


(Not Quite) Prince Charming

by manic_intent



Category: The Hobbit (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, That AU where Bilbo is a security analyst (NOT a spy thank you Kili), and Bilbo isn't sure whether they're trying to save the world, and Gandalf is ex-MI6, and Thorin is a king of some remote isolationist European country, but he isn't entirely sure whether this is really his cup of tea, damn Gandalf and his meddling, or just the isolationist European country, the concept of the modern monarchy is so unfashionable isn't it Thorin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:23:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 68,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The problem, Bilbo would later tell Gandalf in aggrieved irritation, was not so much the unannounced visitors, oh <i>no</i>, but the fact that due to the lateness of the hour and sheer merciless fate, it came to be that at the respectable age of forty, Bilbo was being introduced to a real, live <i>king</i> while wearing striped pyjamas and fluffy slippers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At first I wasn't entirely sure whether I wanted to post this after all, but then @beingevil kept reblogging "modern!AU" photographs of Richard Armitage and Martin Freeman on tumblr, so I suppose I'll try and feed this ficbunny a little and see where it goes. 
> 
> I don't enjoy reinventing the wheel, and I've already done the journey-to-Erebor-fighting-Smaug thing in my last Thilbo fic, so I'll probably have to come up with something else this time round :( I'm always open to suggestions?

I.

The problem, Bilbo would later tell Gandalf in aggrieved irritation, was not so much the unannounced visitors, oh _no_ , but the fact that due to the lateness of the hour and sheer merciless fate, it came to be that at the respectable age of forty, Bilbo was being introduced to a real, live _king_ while wearing striped pyjamas and fluffy slippers.

Granted, in the four decades of his life to date Bilbo was no stranger to abject humiliation by any means, if only because he had always been vertically challenged and had been forced to go through the cruel gauntlet that was state school, but he was fairly sure that where the British were concerned, this particular episode was quite possibly, as it were, forging new horizons in the wide sea of utter mortification. 

"He doesn't _mind_ ," Gandalf arched his whiskery gray eyebrows with an expression of innocent surprise. He had trailed behind Bilbo to the bedroom, leaning against the doorway while Bilbo hastily buttoned up his best shirt. "After all, the hour is late, and I did not call ahead to notify you that we were coming."

"Yes, why _didn't_ you call ahead?" Bilbo hissed, "I could have appreciated a _text_ , even, maybe along the lines of 'Dear William Robert Baggins, I will in an hour or so be bringing along some scions of East European royalty, so please ensure that the kettle is on and you are appropriately dressed'?" 

"I never text," Gandalf drawled, and held up two long-fingered, bony hands in supplication when Bilbo bristled and briefly considered the ambit of justifiable homicide. "This is a rather unusual situation, old friend, and we've had to go to some great lengths to come to your apartment without being followed. In the circumstances, propriety is rather something of an _intellectual_ exercise, isn't it?"

Bilbo exhaled explosively, as he threaded through his cufflinks. "I suppose... oh, well, then, um," he muttered, as he cleared his throat, "I think I've seen the pictures after the... but they _really_ are royalty?"

"Technically, exiled royalty, but the designate applies. King Thorin of Erebor, Crown Prince Fíli and Prince Kíli, all of the House of Durin."

"How am I meant to address them?" Bilbo asked nervously. "Sir? Your Majesty?"

"Well, by name, of course," Gandalf's eyebrows rose again, though out of evil amusement this time. When the mind was decaying from age, Bilbo thought sourly, it usually either ran towards intricate shades of malice or a frumpy, vague benevolence, and Gandalf had always been well-versed in the former. "They won't object. What are titles between friends? Come. That should be the kettle."

Bilbo was still painfully self-conscious when he seated himself at the small table of his humble kitchen after pouring out the tea, but thankfully, Thorin didn't even seem to notice. It was quite easy to believe that Thorin _was_ royalty - he had a powerful set to his broad shoulders, and keenly arresting eyes; a firm cast to his jaw that was almost cruel, on the verge of marring otherwise elegantly handsome features. He had a neatly trimmed beard and oddly long hair that fell in a thick mane to his shoulders, and he wore a beautifully cut charcoal gray suit and a white shirt. In strange contrast to his clothes, on his ring finger was a large silver ring with a lattice over a huge precious gem, an oddly barbaric note to a picture of carefully groomed power. 

Royalty, but not so much of the Sunday-best-waving-in-a-horse-carriage sort, as the seemingly harmless breed of British monarchy tended to lean towards, but more of the off-with-his-head, why-yes-I-have-a-medieval-dungeon type, Bilbo felt gloomily. It would just be his luck.

Thorin's heirs - his nephews - looked no different from other boys around their age, keenly curious and seemingly eternally good natured. There was something about their uncle in Fíli's jaw and Kíli's eyes and hair, but other than that they could have passed as any teenager on the street, dressed in jeans and shirts, exuberant to the point of being childlike. Thorin arched an eyebrow when Bilbo offered them some biscuits, but there was something rather amusing in watching the level of chocolate chip cookies dwindle steadily in the glass jar. Royalty or not, kids would be kids.

"This location is secure?" Thorin was asking Gandalf, his accented English harsh and guttural, almost Germanic.

"We weren't followed, and I doubt that anyone knows of this place."

"Surely MI6 has a more appropriate safehouse. I do not approve of unnecessarily involving civilians."

Gandalf sighed, even as Bilbo stared sharply at Gandalf, astonished. "MI6? _You_?"

When asked about his profession, Gandalf had always mentioned something or other about being self-employed in the 'publishing business' before he had retired to become an occasionally cranky fixture in the coffee shop that Bilbo tended to frequent for breakfast; one of the various friendly faces that Bilbo had become used to in Staffordshire. They spoke on occasion now and then, and Gandalf sometimes visited during tea, but Bilbo had never had particular cause to make enough of their friendship to harbor much curiosity about who Gandalf had been prior to his quiet retirement.

Even now, Bilbo couldn't quite summon the imagination to picture Gandalf in a sleek black and white suit, or anything out of the shapeless gray shirts and trousers that he tended to favour, their uniform monotony broken up occasionally by equally faded dull cardigans, an ode to the slow death of good taste. Along with the constant lingering scent of good tobacco and chamomile about him, Gandalf had always seemed to be the very picture of a harmless elderly retiree, if one disregarded his sharp tongue and prying nature.

Gandalf harrumphed at his question, and Thorin seemed amused - the king's mouth curled sharply. "You don't suppose that I have quite so many chances to speak with deposed kings due to my skill in chess, do you? Now, Thorin, as to your question, yes, there are more appropriate safehouses, but officially, MI6 is not interested in assisting you. Therefore, unfortunately, the safehouses are off limits."

"Not interested in...!" Fíli began, but Thorin held up a hand, cutting his nephew off.

"That is disappointing."

"Is it?" Gandalf shrugged. "It is not government policy to interfere unduly with other governments, Thorin, particularly with no sanction or decision from the United Nations or NATO." 

"And they would not act," Thorin growled, "When a terrorist group violently seizes control of an entire nation?"

"Terrorism is a matter of definition, my dear Thorin, and coup d'états have on occasion proved able to create stable governments," Gandalf replied, unperturbed, "The concept of the modern, powerful monarchy has long grown... unfashionable, shall we say, perhaps even more unfashionable than militant extremists. Is it not better to retire quietly somewhere on the Continent? Thanks to the particular nature of royalty, it's quite possible that you're related in some way to nearly every crowned figurehead this side of Europe, after all. You won't be left destitute." 

"SMAUG is not your usual group of angry insurgents," Thorin retorted, "Should they gain control of the Arkenstone technology, they will spread like a cancer over Europe itself."

"And there, your _Majesty_ , is the crux of the problem," Gandalf smiled thinly. "Thanks to your House's isolationist policies in the last few centuries, this 'Arkenstone technology' that you have described seems rather... unbelievable. You've permitted few foreigners into your kingdom for decades, and our political espionage is already spotty, let alone our knowledge of your country's technological advances. If your country possessed black gold rather than the normal sort that gleams and glitters, perhaps you could have moved America - and by default, the United Kingdom - to your side, but you have nothing to trade to us but a dream of infinite, portable clean energy."

"You accuse me of _lying_?"

"I accuse nothing, Thorin. But that is beside the point. I have been instructed by an old friend of mine - and a relative of yours - to assist you to my best capacity despite my retirement. I have also been brought to understand that this is without MI6 sanction, and as such would be burned if I make any mistakes whatsoever. In the light of _that_ , your Majesty, perhaps you should be persuaded to view my willing involvement with a greater degree of _kindness_."

Thorin flushed, but he sat back down from where he had half-risen from his chair. "I appreciate the favour." 

"And well you should." Gandalf glanced abruptly over at Bilbo, who found himself straightening up hastily. "Besides Bilbo here is no mere civilian. He is a security analyst. One of the best. If you need to break back into your own kingdom, there are few other people I should want with me."

"Ah," Thorin seemed a little surprised, even as the princes shot Bilbo keenly curious looks. "MI6 as well? Or CIA?"

"What?" Bilbo interjected, blinking, "What - I'm not-"

"Isn't 'security analyst' the usual word for 'spy'?" Kíli pointed out cheerfully, evidently high on processed sugar, just as his brother added, "Like in Mission Impossible!"

" _No_ -"

"Regardless," Gandalf interrupted, as Bilbo reddened, "Mister Baggins is an MI6 contractor, and a very successful one-"

"Gandalf, come on-"

"Although he might not have known about the true identity of his employer at the time, MI6 has been very impressed by Mister Baggin's work with AEGIS and MANDALA, which have become keystones of the so-called 'New' MI6." 

" _That_ was MI6?" Bilbo blinked. He _had_ thought it a little strange at the time that a small private equity firm would have been so interested in surveillance coordination technology. "Is that why you retired in Staffordshire? To keep an eye on me?"

"Among other things," Gandalf conceded, if with his usual, irritating air of affable mystery. "It occurred to me that if breaking into Erebor is what you need, then Mister Baggins is just the man for the job."

"We're breaking into a _country_?" Bilbo repeated, uncertain whether to feel horrified or curious, or both, "Isn't that highly illegal?"

"Well," Gandalf huffed, unperturbed, "Theoretically." 

"How can something only be _theoretically_ illegal?"

"Ah, Mister Baggins," Gandalf grinned a crooked, whiskery grin, even as Thorin snorted, "To answer that very question is perhaps the raison d'être of the legal profession."

"Um," Bilbo hedged, "I'm really not very sure about this, Gandalf." Espionage, smuggling, and/or assisting with light guerrilla tactics, at his age? He would have to be insane to-

"Excellent! We leave tomorrow."

"What? But I - Gandalf...!"

II.

Despite having been railroaded into it all and spending a whole night consumed with bad dreams about being arrested for various increasingly dubious crimes, the lack of royalty around the house when Bilbo crawled out of bed for his morning cup of tea was... disappointing, in a way. The beds in the guest rooms had even been neatly made. He made a breakfast of toast in a gray pre-caffeine funk, then nearly fumbled his toast over himself when Gandalf coasted into the kitchen, blithe as you please, and settled down at the table, helping himself to bread.

"I, er, good morn-" Bilbo caught himself as Gandalf raised his whiskery eyebrows again. For some reason, the old man had a remarkably peevish attitude towards polite greetings. Possibly a sign of the onset of senility. "I thought that everyone had left," he concluded, a little awkwardly. From under which rock had Gandalf unearthed himself, anyway? The house had been empty when Bilbo had woken up. Had he picked the lock? The security systems should have alerted-

"Preparations had to be made. And besides, I'm not too comfortable about them staying in one place for too long," Gandalf lifted a bony shoulder, even as he wordlessly and shamelessly slid Bilbo's spare key across the table, the thief. "SMAUG is very resourceful."

"So they're an actual terrorist group?"

"In a sense," Gandalf seemed amused again, at the question, "And again, not particularly. Not by many modern definitions. They have no religious underpinnings, nor do they seem to have any general political leanings. MI6 had always thought them more of a modern form of criminal enterprise rather than a terrorist organisation. A modern mafia," he elaborated, when Bilbo looked confused, "Interested only in profit."

"Why would they want a country?"

"Many reasons. And, I have to admit, if they did truly take over Erebor, then that is a very great prize indeed."

"You don't believe Thorin's story?"

Gandalf sniffed, and took a sip of a cup of tea that Bilbo poured for him. "MI6 has been strongly advised to extend him the benefit of doubt by a certain august lady, but I suppose we shall see."

"Surely a mafia organisation isn't a desirable form of government."

"Sadly - or not - in contrast, the concept of a modern monarchy, my dear Bilbo," Gandalf noted dryly, "Is an exceedingly anachronistic form of government, and, ultimately, an unpopular concept on the field of international politics. While, depending on your point of view, a government focused on economic profit and military strength might even be somewhat democratic." Gandalf smiled his whiskery, ironic smile as he said that. "Capitalist, even."

"Jordan and Monaco are monarchies." Bilbo groped briefly through his admittedly poor knowledge of international politics.

"Monaco and Jordan are constitutional monarchies," Gandalf corrected, "Brunei and Qatar are closer examples to Erebor."

"Stable countries."

"Just because a country is stable does not mean that its form of government is _right_ , my dear Bilbo," Gandalf noted, though he seemed pleased at this point, "Nor does instability indicate that an experiment with democracy is necessarily wrong. But the point is not a relevant one in this case, is it?"

"Is Thorin a good king?" Bilbo pressed, and when Gandalf arched an eyebrow, he folded his arms tightly, "I won't agree to help a tyrant."

"You are so terribly English," Gandalf chided, though his eyes gleamed with amusement. "The fact is, we are uncertain. Erebor is stable and self-sufficient, but our spies have never managed to pry very far into the dealings of the House of Durin. No one gets in, and no one within Erebor seems to have willingly tried to leave - until now. I suppose that is one reason why MI6 may have bowed - if secretly - to Her will, at least to the extent of digging me out of retirement. Curiosity."

"And the other reasons? This 'Arkenstone' tech?"

"The energy race, in its own way, defines the world, Bilbo. Thorin has indicated a willingness to share technology with the world, should he retake Erebor. But more worrying is the possibly of the secret of the Arkenstone tech falling into the wrong hands."

"Isn't that already too late? SMAUG has been in occupation for months, hasn't it?"

"Thorin seems confident that it is yet a secret." 

Something about Gandalf's amusement made Bilbo ask, "You think that it doesn't exist?"

"I think that it is a pipe dream," Gandalf finished his cup of tea neatly, "But sometimes pipe dreams are well worth investigating. And, of course, She was quite insistent."

"I suppose," Bilbo conceded reluctantly, "That I'll try to help, though I'm not sure what sort of help I can truly give you. If Erebor is more technologically advanced-"

"Far more, if reports - and Thorin - are to be believed." 

"-then we might end up sitting on the doorstep of the Iron Ring for years." Bilbo knew that much about Erebor, at least.

"We can only try," Gandalf pointed out, unperturbed again. "Even She can only ask that much of Her subjects." 

"Will we be flying to Budapest, then?" Bilbo asked. "That's the closest international airport, isn't it?"

"Oh, not at all. That would be quite impossible."

"Then?" Bilbo asked, with a touch of sarcasm despite himself, "Horseback?"

"Amusing as that may be, I'm afraid that in this day and age a line of ponies would only attract far more attention than that is worth. We are going by train. Pack what you need, and meet us at the Eurostar terminal in St Pancras by four o' clock today."

"And _that_ won't leave a paper trail?"

Gandalf, however, merely smiled his irritatingly knowing smile. "See you at four o' clock."

Despite his misgivings, Bilbo had to admit to himself that he _was_ , blast it all, _curious_ , and at his age, at that. He packed lightly and had arrived in London far enough ahead of schedule to enjoy a light lunch close to St Pancras, after which he had wandered about the spectacular trainshed for a while before heading towards the Eurostar terminal. 

Somewhat to his surprise, despite being an hour early, a man was already at the terminal, holding up a sheet of note paper with Bilbo's name written on it in neat copperplate. The man was stout and taller than Bilbo, though not as tall as Thorin, and around his good-natured smile, an impressive corona of plush white hair had spread in a lush mane of a beard and sideburns over weathered skin. He was dressed in a plain maroon coat that was almost dark enough to be black, buttoned up over his trousers and black oxfords. 

"Mister Baggins," the man shook his hand, when Bilbo approached him and introduced himself. "My name is Balin of Fundin. So very pleased to meet you." Like Thorin, his accent was pronounced, guttural.

"The pleasure is mine," Bilbo offered in response, then added, awkwardly, "Have you been waiting here all day? I was told that we were meant to meet at four."

"Ah, we saw you coming," Balin replied dismissively, as he led Bilbo through check in with a flash of a card at security, luggage and all, "The lads wanted to go up and fetch you, but we ain't so sure if the station's secure, and you seemed like you were toddling about just fine. This way, Mister Baggins."

A sleek silver bullet of a train sat idling at a platform, unmarked and unpainted, with only four carriages behind it. A private train, then, though one of a make that Bilbo had never seen. Wasn't this only going to invite attention? Puzzled, Bilbo followed Balin onto the train, listening to Balin's studious patter only absently as he stood for a moment and gaped. He had been expecting luxury, certainly, but this -

It was as though he had stepped from reality into the set of a science fiction film. The hull was a dull silver, patterned with lights and a complex rig of consoles and control panels to his right, which stood empty, the chair before it wheeled a little to a side. On the consoles flickered a constant stream of surveillance images, of St Pancras station and its outskirts, as well as of locations that Bilbo could not immediately place. More consoles were interspersed along the length of the carriage, and bulky silver cases with complex weaves of cables and glittering panels were strung up to what looked like a glass cage of tame lightning suspended near the ceiling of the engine car, the heart of which looked to be some sort of brilliant, fist-sized gem. 

"Arkenstone tech?" Bilbo asked Balin, when the door hissed close behind them.

"Yes, yes," Balin seemed pleased that he knew.

"But Gandalf said that..." Bilbo trailed off, unsure whether to proceed to tell Balin that the last he had heard of the Arkenstone tech, it was supposedly a question of science fiction. This seemed rather defiantly _real_ to him, all the same.

"I'm afraid that the world governments are rather less trusting than you, Mister Baggins," Balin noted wryly, "And this is only a very minor offshoot of the Arkenstone tech. An improved battery, rather than the real thing. The charge will hold steady for years, but it is not producing the charge. I'll show you to your cabin, and then Thorin will be pleased to have a light tea with you in the dining car."

"Is he in a better mood than yesterday?" Bilbo couldn't quite stop himself from asking wryly.

"Ah, laddie, he has not been in the best of moods since we've had to leave our home," Balin replied calmly, and even as Bilbo coloured a little and was about to apologize, Balin added, "But he is in as good a mood of late as I have seen, so he very likely wouldn't try to bite your head off with no provocation. Probably."

Bilbo hid a grimace. This unexpected detour from the well-worn grooves of his usual life was not getting off to a good start.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo was beginning to see why absolute monarchies were politically unpopular.

III.

Bilbo took one step into the dining car and stopped dead, stifling a gasp of shock. Instead of the silvery hull that he had expected, the entirety of the dining car was covered in a dizzyingly perfect, seamless panoramic view that made it seem as though he had taken a step through space and onto a platform suspended over a steep drop of jagged gray stone, dusted thickly with snow. The bowl of the sky was a cloudless blue the colour of a robin's egg, and in the stomach-churning drop to his left, Bilbo could see the distant burrs of snow-laden conifers.

Feeling a sudden lurch of vertigo, Bilbo reflexively grabbed for the edge of the doorway he had just stepped through, and looked up to see Thorin watching him, expressionless. Thorin was seated at one of six dining tables attached to the hull, the edge disappearing seamlessly into the 'view'. Plush armchairs were placed two apiece at each table, and the ground was carpeted in rich maroon. There were no lights that Bilbo could see, although from the shadows cast by the furniture the light sources had to be overhead, rather than from the illusion of midday over the mountain range.

Perhaps even more strangely - if that was even possible - Thorin now had an axe, of all things, buckled to his belt, its haft long enough to brush against the maroon carpet. The axe head was a dull matte black, and the haft was some sort of polished hardwood, also nearly black in hue. A multifaceted crystal had been set deep into the centre of the axe head, and oddly enough, the edge of the blade was a bluish silver. The stark barbarism of the weapon looked utterly out of place surrounded as it was in a room straight out of science fiction.

Maybe it was cultural...?

Shakily at first, then forcing confidence, deciding to try to ignore both the view and the axe, Bilbo managed, "You, er, Balin said that your Majesty would like to have tea?"

"Have a seat." Thorin waved him to the chair opposite him, and dismissed with a gesture a paper-thin metallic console before him, which scrolled itself seamlessly under the table. Tea was, Bilbo noted, already in the process of being deconstructed, but he poured for them both anyway from the silver pot and helped himself to a cooling madeline. "And dispense with the titles. A king with no kingdom is one only in name." 

"Um, certainly," Bilbo hesitated, uncertain whether it would be rather too forward, nonetheless, to get onto first name basis with royalty, exiled or not, and struck out for a safe topic. Gesturing at the view, he said, "This is remarkable."

"A trifle," Thorin noted, dismissively, "If it unsettles you, we can change it."

"No, no, it's very beautiful. The Carpathian mountains, I presume?" 

"Over Erebor," Thorin confirmed, though he was expressionless as he glanced out over at the snow. "Our home." 

"So it's true? The entirety of your kingdom is underground?"

"Most of it." Thorin rapped his knuckles briefly - and seemingly impossibly - over nothing at all, connecting with the hull. "The mountains are too harsh for much else." 

"How do you manage self-sufficiency?" Bilbo asked, mystified, though he made the logical guess quickly. "Advanced hydroponics and livestock farms?"

Thorin's tone took on a touch of unfriendliness. "It is irrelevant to this venture."

"Of course. I was just curious," Bilbo replied defensively. Thorin wasn't _his_ king, and he couldn't be expected to have to treat him with any more respect than what propriety demanded. 

"I hope that you would stifle your curiosity with regards to anything other than what is necessary for your purpose," Thorin retorted coldly. "Balin will provide you with a contract of employment within the hour."

"What use would a contract be?" Bilbo pointed out wryly, "I'm fairly sure that whatever we'll be up to, it'll be illegal enough to make any contract unenforceable." Bilbo had a fairly shaky grasp of international law, but he was sure that what they were about to do wasn't right on the straight and narrow. Especially since Gandalf had so painstakingly pointed out that the United Nations hadn't approved. 

"Then why are you here?"

Yes, exactly. Why indeed? He was in his _forties_ , for God's sake. It was a little late in life to start breaking international laws on a spectacular scale.

Still, 'because Gandalf is a meddling old man' was, Bilbo sensed, not going to be an appropriate answer. "Curiosity. _Personal_ curiosity," he added, when Thorin frowned at him. "I _am_ a civilian. Up until yesterday I had no idea who Gandalf was, or what my work had actually been used for."

"Curiosity?" 

"New technology fascinates me. Goes with the job," Bilbo tipped his head at the hull, a quick smile tugging at his mouth. "This is astonishing-"

"If you find this astonishing," Thorin retorted, "Then perhaps the Iron Ring will be far too advanced for you to understand, let alone undermine, and you have only a week to do it, if everything goes well." 

"Do you know anyone else willing and able to try?" Pride and self-respect forced Bilbo to hold Thorin's imperious, intense stare, "No? Then I'm afraid that you're stuck with me, _your Majesty_."

Thorin scowled, and held the stare until Bilbo stiffened and felt his eyes start to water, then it was Thorin who glanced away curtly, settling back against his chair as he looked down over the conifer forest. "I am not used to disrespect," Thorin said finally, in a tone too neutral to be a rebuke and too flat to be an apology.

"A great man once noted that an unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth, O King," Bilbo couldn't help but add, if with as gentle a smile as he could manage to take away any real reproach. Thorin's gaze swung up sharply, studied him searchingly for a moment, as though considering whether or not to take insult, then Thorin reached for his tea, the tense moment fading.

"There are two engineers on the train. Bifur cannot speak English, but Bofur should be able to answer your questions - and direct you to a console. All the information that we have on the Iron Ring is within it. Do you know what the Iron Ring is?"

"From what I've heard," Bilbo said cautiously, who had only managed to do some hurried research during the trip from Staffordshire and London, "It is a physical barrier around all known tunnel entrances to Erebor, made of some unknown alloy. There are theories with regards to how anyone gets in or out-" 

"Then you know nothing of Erebor," Thorin interrupted, rather rudely, and looked grim. "Trying to return may well be a fool's hope after all."

"I will learn," Bilbo replied stiffly, trying to keep his temper in check, "I presume that I won't be completely useless, if Gandalf has faith in my abilities."

"Gandalf," Thorin repeated, in a low growl, as though giving voice to a curse, then he seemed to visibly force himself to relax. "Perhaps."

"You are both acquainted? Before this business?" Bilbo ventured, trying not to show how curious he really was.

"No. I gather that he knew my father - though I am not certain how this could have occurred. Regardless, his reputation is known to me," Thorin said slowly, with a glance at Bilbo, as though trying to check if he was being tested. Satisfied, he added, "Gandalf is said to be one of the greatest of his kind in his generation. Perhaps even to date. He is what intelligence agencies would call a 'fixer'. Someone who would be sent into the most difficult situations, often alone, to work out a solution. His success rate, I am told, is phenomenal. It earned him the nickname of 'the Wizard'."

"That's... good to know."

"He is old now and his glory days are behind him," Thorin retorted quietly, with a surprising vein of venom in his voice, "And instead of the aid I have requested I have a retired spy and a civilian with no knowledge whatsoever of Ereborean technology. Your governments are sending you to your deaths."

Cold reality sunk back in at Thorin's flat reminder of his circumstances, and Bilbo fought the urge to wilt. This _was_ completely insane, he knew. Erebor seemed to be at least a decade or so more advanced than the rest of the world, and there was every reason to suspect that all the tricks of the trade that Bilbo had ever learned or invented would be as useless against the Iron Ring as pebbles heaved against a titanium wall. It was arrogant of him in the extreme to even think that he could achieve anything.

Still.

He _was_ curious. 

And if he could learn anything at all from the trip- 

"If Bofur is free at present," Bilbo noted politely, "I should like to access that console."

Thorin frowned at him, again searchingly, then the corner of his mouth twisted. "Head to the last carriage. Bofur is the one in the woollen hat. Dismissed."

"By your leave, my _lord_ ," Bilbo couldn't have stopped the far-too-British inflexion of sarcasm to save his life, even as he rose from the chair, and for a moment, as Thorin clenched his hands, he felt perhaps that he had gone too far... but then Thorin simply snorted and brought up the flat scroll of metal again, pointedly ignoring him.

Maybe the need to satisfy his personal curiosity wasn't going to be worth getting mauled for however long it would take for them to reach and enter Erebor, Bilbo felt sourly. He was beginning to see why insurrection was a popular trend where monarchies were concerned. Being treated as a servant or a piece of furniture did so bring out a person's inner pyromaniac.

IV.

Bofur and Bifur seemed to be related in some way; there was a touch of familial similarity about their eyes and thick brows, and both were dressed in near identical faded shirts, heavy gloves, brown breeches tucked into chunky leather boots, discoloured and freshly grease-stained in patches, but the resemblance ended there. Where Bofur sported an impressive walrus moustache under his incongruously large woollen hat, Bifur had a spreading sprawl of a beard that fed from black to gray. He also had a horrific scar that ran from over his left eye to high over his scalp, as though someone had tried to split his head open at some point in his life; it was an unhealthy pink and jagged. Bilbo tried not to stare.

They were knee deep in the multicoloured guts of one of the silver cases that lined what looked like a second and more complex engine car. An unlovely, massive machine squatted in the centre of the car, large enough to allow only a narrow corridor between the cases and the sides of the machine, which were lined with rows of fins that slanted downwards but allowed viewers to catch a look of part of the interior of the machine, which seemed to be a huge glass reproduction of a brain, if Bilbo had to hazard a guess. Sparks of lightning leapt in jags of light from each impossibly intricate loop to another, and the room shook from a deep, soft machine purr. 

Both engineers also wore axes, smaller ones, also with similar gems set into the axe heads, and their hands went to the hafts of their weapons when Bilbo cleared his throat. Bifur frowned at Bilbo, but Bofur seemed to get over his surprise quickly, breaking out into a friendly smile. "Ah, it is the Englishman!" 

"Pleased to meet you," Bilbo offered. "You must be Bofur and Bifur? Please call me Bilbo."

"Unusual name for the English," Bofur ventured, as he wiped down his hands absently on his trousers and stepped gingerly out of the coils of metal around him. Bifur grunted, apparently deciding to ignore them both as he set himself back to his task. 

Grateful for the overt conversational cue, Bilbo explained, "My full name is William Robert Baggins. When I was in school there were always several boys called William - popular English name, you see - and when I was in my second year there were five of us. Someone had the idea of condensing our first and second names into pseuds, so I was left with 'Bill' and 'Bob'. The amalgamation stuck."

"That is a strange custom. Aren't names important to you foreigners? No living Ereborean shares the same name." 

Bofur gestured for Bilbo to step out of the second engine car, into the living quarters. Bilbo had been accorded a room of his own in the centre of the car, and when Bilbo opened the door to it at Bofur's nod, he found that Balin had already neatly stacked his bags to the side of the room, next to the table fitted to the wall. The bed was plush, with snowy sheets, and there was even a small bookshelf, set into the wall, the books held in place seemingly by magic. Like the rest of the train, the room was windowless, the hull the same silver, though the carpet here was an earthy brown. There was a small ensuite bathroom and shower, and even a wardrobe, each component perfectly in place in the room to maximize space while still giving the illusion of luxury. 

"Perhaps because there are far more of us than people in Erebor. Are all your trains like this?" Bilbo asked, as Bofur stepped over to the table.

"Oh no," Bofur replied, smiling, "Our usual trains have some of the facilities, but this girl's state of the art. She's one of the royal trains. Thorin's personal train, to be precise. Her name's Orcrist," Bofur added, patting the silver hull affectionately. "She's a good girl. Fastest train out of the Iron Foundries. Do you want me to give you the big tour, or do you just want to get started?"

"We have time, I think? If it's not too much trouble."

"Right. First up, the bathroom works more or less about the same as what you're used to, except everything's automated. And if you want to change how your room looks, you just ask. Orcrist, lights off." The room plunged into darkness. "Orcrist, lights on." A dim glow grew from nowhere apparent on the ceiling and spread, filling the room back with a soft light.

"And if I want to change the, um, the view?"

"Ask. Same thing."

"Orcrist," Bilbo hesitated, then asked, "Beach?"

"Please specify, Master Baggins." Bilbo jumped as the voice seemed to come out of nowhere around them, modulated and sexless. 

"Malibu," Bilbo picked the first name he could think of out of his mind, and the hull blurred, before fading into a spectacular view of a stretch of beach, the sand seemingly inching up onto the carpet itself, the surf tickling up just beyond the room. Bilbo half expected the various lines of slowly broiling human bodies on the sand to start up and scream at the sight of the both of them. "Incredible."

"You'll go stir crazy living underground if you didn't have this kind of tech," Bofur noted dryly. "'Course, not everyone has viewfinders with this sort of resolution or access, but we make do."

"You have so much technology and yet..." Bilbo stopped himself from finishing his thought, but Bofur was already grinning at him.

"And yet we still have a king? Funny world, isn't it? But I can't say that the line of Durin's done wrong by us, and in some ways, things be easier. It's not all too different from what you're used to. We do have ministers. Same three arms of government. Judicial, executive, legislative. The king just sits on top and makes the hardest decisions. Take your governments, on the other hand. You people spend so much time arguing with each other it's a wonder that anything gets done."

"I suppose it could be seen that way," Bilbo allowed, "But what about the voice of the people?"

"Give a man a job and a good life and security and sometimes he isn't too concerned about who's boss. As to the rest of the time," Bofur shrugged, clearly unconcerned, "You can get an audience with the king. Might have to wait quite a bit if you don't have a good reason for it, but there it is. Here, this is how you bring up the console. It's print activated to our prints." The same thin metal scroll curled up from the desk. "To make things easier for you, I've mocked up a quick bridging interface so that it looks a wee bit more like what you're used to." 

Indeed, the interface did look remarkably like Windows 7, and before the console, a soft array of green light outlined a basic QWERTY keyboard on the desk and a flat 'touch' pad beside it. Bilbo hid a grin. "You didn't have to go to all that trouble. But thank you."

"All the information that you're authorised to access is in those folders. We just hope that you don't do anything to break my girl," Bofur patted a seeming patch of empty space, making a thumping sound against the hull.

"My word of honour, Bofur." 

"Pleasure. I don't usually get to meet any foreigners," Bofur noted, with a wry smile. "You're smaller than I thought you would be."

"That's... more of an accident of birth than any real gauge of height... have you seen Gandalf?"

"Aye, and that one's a head too tall," Bofur grinned, clearly amused by this topic, "The two of you will have us all thinking that Outsiders are either giants or halflings!"

"If you walked outside into the station you'll see that _that_ isn't the case," Bilbo pointed out, a little stiffly, but Bofur sobered quickly.

"Walk outside? Never. The old girl needs me here," he added hastily, when Bilbo frowned at him. "Can't run about." 

"Surely-"

"Besides, all that great big sky, with nothing in it, right above," Bofur added, uneasily, "That don't sit right. And don't you laugh, Master Baggins."

"I wasn't going to." That did make sense. A race that spent their entire lives under a mountain probably harbored varying degrees of agoraphobia, no matter how used they were to brilliantly realistic projections. "It isn't so bad." 

"Maybe," Bofur didn't seem convinced. "We'll be heading off in a few hours, depending on whether Gandalf comes back on time. If you have any questions, just let Orcrist know, and she'll get me."

"Thank you for your help, Bofur." Despite his growing misgivings, Bilbo could feel a growing spark of excitement, just looking at the alien console before him, with its equally alien keyboard and 'touchpad'. The things that he could learn!

"Say," Bofur added, turning about just as he was heading for the open door of the cabin, "Are you really a spy? Like Gandalf? The princes said that you were a 'security analyst'."

Bilbo sighed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A wall with no doors would be a prison.

V.

Bilbo was so absorbed in the console that when Orcrist's neutral voice spoke around him, he was startled into nearly falling out of his chair.

"Master Baggins? Your presence is requested in the dining car."

"Oh! Um. Certainly." Bilbo took a few deep breaths to slow down his heart rate, took a few more breaths to unclench his hands from the edge of the desk, and got to his feet. "Orcrist, what time is it?" 

"Ereborean-"

"Local time, thanks."

"Four-fifteen in the afternoon, Master Baggins."

"Are we already on the move?" The floor seemed still to him, but hours of just reading through the primer on the Iron Ring had made Bilbo uncomfortably aware that the Ereboreans were probably more than capable of making a perfectly stable train. God. He'd had _hours_ with the console and he still wasn't fully certain of what the Ereboreans were capable of.

Or, more precisely, what they _weren't_ capable of. 

Bilbo was abruptly entirely too aware that he had been, by all measure, rather sharp with Thorin, and he had an uncomfortably stark mental image of London in flames, with vehicles and flying crafts right out of science fiction hovering about spraying out death. Quickly, he gave himself a mental kick, silently scolding himself for his self-indulgence. Surely Thorin wouldn't take on the world itself just out of petulance. And besides, if he ever did get back into Erebor, it would very likely be due to Bilbo's efforts, so that should balance out any insult, shouldn't it?

Hopefully.

"Yes, Master Baggins. We left St Pancras Station at four-two."

"Thank you," Bilbo said automatically, then felt awkward for thanking the artificial intelligence, and let himself out of the cabin. He steeled himself when he reached the dining car, but when the door slid open, he nearly took a step back into the safety of the previous car. The mountain view had been replaced by a mad, sleeting blur of landscape, of buildings and roads sleeting past in an eye-watering blur, and it took Bilbo a horrified few seconds to realize that he was looking through what was effectively a near-seamless window. 

"Ah, Bilbo," Gandalf greeted him urbanely from Thorin's table, where another armchair had been pulled up. "Sit down, sit down."

Bilbo walked over stiffly, trying not to look too closely at the buildings whizzing past at bowel-churning speed, and sat down opposite Thorin, hoping that he didn't look too pale. The tea things had been cleared, and Gandalf was smoking something musky and earthy in an old-fashioned pipe, ignoring Thorin's brief look of irritation as he blew out a smoke ring into the filtered air of the train. 

"You, er, wanted to talk?" Bilbo addressed this to Gandalf. 

"Why yes. Thorin expressed a curiosity as to how much you've learned so far."

"Well, I've just had a few hours," Bilbo hedged, "But my main question still stands. The Iron Ring is an actual physical barrier metres thick, of some sort of unbreakable metal alloy. It can't be cut, and it can't be blasted open with conventional explosives, according to the report. It is also built with no doors, and it seems to emit a high level, localised version of an electromagnetic pulse within a very strict radius. Surely there is a gate? Was that left out of the report on purpose?"

Thorin snorted, even as Gandalf leaned forward a fraction, his smile quick but amused. "Any other speculations, Bilbo?"

"There has to be a way in," Bilbo shook his head slowly, "A hidden gate."

"And if not?"

"Why then," Bilbo said helplessly, "A wall is a wall by any name, regardless of what it's made of, and the only other unusual aspect of this barrier is the EMP that it emits. If we start by destabilizing that, perhaps..." Bilbo realized belatedly that Thorin had straightened up in his seat, his stare intent now where it had previously been bored. "It's something about the EMP, isn't it? That's what's keeping you out. Presumably you have some sort of... some sort of smart weapon? Or," Bilbo added, when Thorin started to sneer, "Maybe that's how the door opens. Something electrical, or with an electrical charge has to touch it. The key is electricity." 

"He's very close," Gandalf pointed out mildly, when Thorin's lips thinned instead. "And you have to admit that you'll need a leap of logic to guess at the nature of the problem."

"I want to know how _you_ knew of it," Thorin retorted instead, glowering at Gandalf. "You should not have had any sort of encounter with phaseshift tech. Nor any contact with my father. Why was I never told?"

"You were still young when I first met your father," Gandalf replied blandly. "He was brash, once, and left Erebor. Decided to explore the world, I gather. What with inexperience and youthful misadventure, he fell into a spot of trouble in Odessa and I happened through a stroke of luck to be close by. He had taken ill, had a fever. He was raving in a language I had never heard of before. That was when I was curious."

"You took advantage of his circumstances?"

Gandalf sniffed. "Hardly. In fact, I compromised my own mission and had to be extracted. One of my very, very few failures over my entire career, I should add. To cut a long story short, I helped him to get home. But I never entered Erebor. I did not know who he was when I saw him dying in that camp," Gandalf continued sharply, when Thorin narrowed his eyes. "Nor did I truly even believe him until I saw him walk through the Ring. And I've kept my knowledge of that day from MI6. They are aware of the existence of your father, and the reason for the failure of my mission, but not of the way that he took into the mountains. Nor is MI6 aware of this key."

Thorin exhaled, sounding irritable, but he glanced out at the impossible rush of landscape instead, his hands clenched over the table. Finally, stiffly, he muttered, "I apologize for my words."

"No offense was taken," Gandalf replied blithely, puffing on his pipe, even as Bilbo belatedly took in a soft breath as the thickening tension seemed to fade. "You've had a difficult set of months."

"What is phaseshift tech?" Bilbo asked tentatively, but Thorin merely shot him an annoyed glance and made a gesture. The exit to the engine car abruptly faded away, replaced by the onrushing view of the rail before them, of the insane, ground-eating pace that they were running, and then, to Bilbo's horror, he saw the back of a gleaming line of carriages of a Eurostar train sharing their track, which seemed ploddingly slow before their impossible speed. 

Bilbo thought that they would slow down, or stop, and was bracing himself for deceleration, then he realized with a start that if anything, Orcrist was _accelerating_ , the machine hum that he had heard from the engine room starting to shake through the ground, the table, through his very bones, and even as he was about to rise from his seat with a shout of warning, they came upon the Eurostar train, and he curled his hands tightly over the edges of the table, expecting some sort of horrific collision-

-they flowed _through_ the train.

Startled, Bilbo caught brief glimpses, gray and pale, as though he was sifting through a misty hologram, here a man in a business suit reading the Times, legs crossed, there a matronly woman checking her make-up, two young women chatting, taking snapshots from the windows with their phones, a child, running down the aisle with her mother at her heels... 

And then the train was behind them, fading into the distance. Dimly, Bilbo allowed gravity to take its course and pull him back down onto his seat. He was sweating, he realized, but he was not afraid. Exhilarated, he turned to Thorin, despite knowing that his excitement probably would seem childlike. "How... How in the blazes did you do that? That was incredible! The people in the Eurostar train didn't even notice us! Were we invisible? Wait... this is why you need the EMP switched off, don't you? So you can 'phase' through into Erebor?"

Thorin seemed visibly surprised at the barrage of questions, blinking owlishly, and then he looked sharply at Gandalf when Gandalf began to chuckle, puffing away again at his pipe. "Settle down, Bilbo. But yes. That's the problem in a nutshell. I've been told," Gandalf added, exceedingly amused for some reason, "That the world actually exists in more than three dimensions, and with a sufficient energy surge one can, for a brief moment, move sideways into a different space. Nobody we 'phased' through would even have seen us. I'm not particularly certain why we would still have seen everything, but Thorin's father was, perhaps, deliberately unclear about the specifics." 

"But you mentioned that Thorin's father managed to walk into Erebor by himself?"

"Ah, yes, but that was made possible by a smaller version of the Arkenstone tech. You've seen it, Bilbo. Thorin is wearing it at his belt, in that axe of his. It emits a similar charge, somehow contained, that allows a one-person-ticket through an otherwise solid surface. Granted, a far shorter distance than what Orcrist is capable of, but sufficient enough to get through the Ring."

"Oh." Bilbo blinked, surprised. So Bofur and Bifur... "Wouldn't it have been more practical to put it into a bracelet of some sort? Unless the electronics are hidden in the axehead or the shaft?"

"Bracelet or axe," Thorin growled, "The question of aesthetics is irrelevant. Can you or can you not remotely disable the EMP field?" 

The thrill of experiencing the impossible was beginning to wear off in the face of Thorin's ungracious impatience. Bilbo counted silently in his head to ten, and reminded himself that he'd had intractable clients before, worse than Thorin, even, and it just came with the unfortunate business of being self-employed in an industry where one's client often had little or no interest in the _workings_ of a matter, only the results.

As to the axe, Bilbo supposed, wryly, that if the axe was meant as some sort of disguise, it was a brilliant one. Who would look for a key in a weapon so visibly primitive? Anyone from the outside world would simply, like Bilbo, assume cultural eccentricity on the part of the Ereboreans.

"Bofur mentioned that this... this 'viewfinder' tech is available to the residents of Erebor," Bilbo waved at the rushing landscape around them. "Which means that you have satellite technology, presumably? Advanced satellite technology, that links up to the outside world. Something that links out will give me a way back in, remotely."

"So you can do it?" Thorin asked, and for the first time, he seemed grudgingly impressed.

"Theoretically, yes. However, I see one problem, right off the start," Bilbo began, hesitated, then asked, "What do you know about hacking, your, er-"

"Call me Thorin," Thorin said impatiently. "Yes?"

"All right, um, well, you see, there are several... we'll call them languages. Programming languages. The five most important ones for hackers are Python, C++, Java, Perl and LISP. I took a look at the programming behind Orcrist's systems and the console's operating software and it appears to me that, quite possibly, Ereborean technology is using not only a programming language that doesn't exist elsewhere on Earth, but just like your technology, it's more advanced and complex than anything available on the outside."

"Normally," Bilbo added quickly, as Thorin frowned, "I would only need days to learn a new programming language. Hacking is not so much a matter of learning the language, but learning how to transpose problems. However, whatever Erebor is using, it might take me weeks to learn it, let alone figure out, hah, how to work through security systems that are probably also far more advanced than anything that I've seen or made."

"So you are telling me that you cannot help me."

"I'm telling you that maybe you should have stayed in London for a few more weeks," Bilbo retorted. "What's the rush? You're locked out. You've spent months outside Erebor. Why must you return now? What's a few more weeks?"

"We'll leave that for now," Thorin retorted briskly, with a hard glance at Gandalf, who merely shrugged and puffed out another ring of smoke. "But we must reach Erebor within the next two weeks. Less, if possible." 

"I'm telling you that unless you have another hacker up your sleeve, that won't be possible." 

" _Thankfully_ ," Gandalf interjected, just as Thorin glowered at Bilbo, his hands clenching, "I may have a solution."

He reached within his faded cardigan and drew out a small, square wooden box, which he lay on the table and opened. Within it was a small disc, slightly smaller than a Mini CD, but translucent, as though made of clouded glass. "Your father gave me this before he returned to Erebor," Gandalf explained, as Thorin leaned over for a closer look. "He said that it was a key. Unfortunately, our current technology hasn't been able to read it."

"It's an information disc. An outdated form of technology, at least where Erebor is concerned," Thorin tapped at the table, and a panel slipped open from the seamless metallic surface, to reveal a flat plane of glass that gleamed a pale yellow. On this, he carefully placed the disc, and the plane slid back on top. "Hopefully, it can still be accessed."

Another tap and gesture projected a flat plane across the desk, amplified, and after a pause, numbers and letters began to scroll up over it, in a brilliant wall of text that threw lines of light over their skin. 

"Perhaps it has been corrupted," Gandalf guessed, frowning.

"No, no it hasn't," Bilbo corrected, breathlessly excited, "This _is_ a key! It's transposing a version of the Ereborean programming language into binary. Machine code. It's an earlier version of the language of course, but it's definitely similar. I can use this!"

"Why would my father even have this?" Thorin demanded, watching the text as it scrolled past. "Why would he give it to _you_?"

"Perhaps he saw further than most," Gandalf said wryly, as he settled comfortably back in his seat. "Perhaps he understood that not all 'Outsiders' are monsters out to steal away Erebor. Perhaps he knew that someday you would need the rest of the world." 

Thorin huffed, but he made a gesture, and the text disappeared. The panel slid back, and he carefully picked out the disc, setting it in its velvet nest and closing the box, then pushing it towards Bilbo. "Keep this safe," he said gruffly, and rose to his feet, stalking away towards the front engine car, the doors opening for him, then hissing shut, such that it looked as though he had walked out into fleeting space and had disappeared.

"Orcrist," Gandalf said out aloud, "Times Square, New York." 

The unsettling view of the onrushing landscape faded quickly, and it looked now as though they were seated at the intersection of Times Square. People walked past, oblivious, even through the projection at times, by apparently disappearing and after a few seconds, reappearing on the other side of the carriage, and now that Bilbo looked closely at the billboards, particularly those advertising movies, he said, wryly, "This is in real time, isn't it?"

"Oh yes." Gandalf puffed out another smoke ring. "Very dangerous, the Ereboreans. I am beginning to regret," Gandalf added, more softly, "Bringing you along after all, my dear Bilbo."

"Really? Why?"

"I don't think that Thorin will be quite above... disposing of you once you are of no further use to him," Gandalf tipped his head at the closed door. "He is clearly very possessive of his secrets."

"I, but..." Bilbo blinked, astonished at the suggestion, "I really doubt it, Gandalf. Certainly the man's irascible, but he doesn't seem violent. Homicidally," Bilbo added, a little self-consciously. Thorin did obviously have a bad temper that he didn't bother to hide, though it could be stress.

"Oh, we shall see," Gandalf seemed amused that Bilbo had tried to defend Thorin. "But that is not an insurmountable problem. You will have to open the door from the outside, after all. So the problem likely won't be compounded by you being trapped within the Iron Ring. I will have to think about this, but I suppose that we could just let you out of the train some place safe after you have opened the way."

"Your confidence is comforting," Bilbo said wryly. 

"No, not mine," Gandalf replied, clearly amused again, "But Control expressed confidence in your abilities, and I trust her judgment."

"What about you? Will you be going into Erebor?"

"Of course. It is what I do. But I wouldn't worry about me, old friend," Gandalf added, more gently. "Or about anything more than solving the problem at hand. Let me think about contingencies."

VI.

Any misgivings he had felt at Gandalf's words quickly melted into the pure, hungry joy of discovery. Immersed in memorizing the transposition, Bilbo actually felt a brief surge of irritation when Orcrist stated, "Fíli, Kíli and Gandalf, Master Baggins."

"Outside?"

"Yes. Shall I admit them?"

"Sure." Bilbo sucked in a sigh, and was rubbing a palm over his face when the door to his cabin slid open. Kíli was the first through, a wide and curious grin on his face as he stamped right up to Bilbo's console screen to look avidly at what he was doing. The same irritation rose in Bilbo again, only to be instantly doused when Bilbo caught sight of Fíli's expression, hidden from his brother's view, beside Gandalf. Fíli was pale, and grim, though when he saw that Bilbo had noticed, he made a few visible efforts to compose himself, before he smiled awkwardly, self-conscious. 

Confused, Bilbo glanced at Gandalf, who said, blandly, "Fíli, Kíli, I trust that the both of you will be as good as your word, and won't break anything on purpose. Bilbo, the princes are interested in your equipment. I presume you have a laptop?"

"Oh, er, of course." Bilbo pulled out his poor laptop from his bag. It was, at least on first glance, a Lenovo IdeaPad, but much of it had been extensively refitted. It had been once a self-indulgent toy given that he did most of his work from his rig at home, but powerful as it was, Bilbo was awkwardly aware of how clunky and primitive the sleek laptop seemed next to the metal console he had previously been using. 

He switched it on, and logged in as a guest - safe enough, he hoped - and waved Kíli to it with a mock flourish that made Kíli laugh and - thankfully - Fíli even grinned. Whatever had startled and saddened the older boy was quickly dampened by his curiosity, and the brothers were soon bent over the laptop, jostling. 

Quietly, Bilbo stepped outside, with Gandalf at his heels, and when the door closed behind him, he asked, dryly, "For what purpose was my laptop sacrificed?"

"We are in the Gare du Nord, Paris," Gandalf said obliquely, in his irritating way, "We've picked up a couple of passengers. They're in the engine car."

"Dangerous passengers?"

"Oh, no, not to us. We've picked up, it seems, Thorin's sister Dís and her bodyguard. Dís is the mother of the princes."

"So why did Fíli look as though-"

"The royal siblings are having a right proper flaming row," Gandalf cut in, just as blandly as though he was observing the weather. "In their native tongue, at that, so I couldn't understand a word of it. Therefore I decided to make myself useful and remove the children from the vicinity, once I saw that Fíli was beginning to get very upset."

Bilbo often struck anyone who knew him a little or by a lot as an exceptionally level-headed individual: an angry ex had even once called him 'unnaturally' calm. This was because he did not usually enjoy conflict, particularly where the matter was trivial and not really worth getting angry over - he often tried to see reason, and get others to see reason in turn, as sensibly as possible. He was also a firm believer in the concept of privacy, at least within the bounds of the law - otherwise, he would not have been as successful in his business as he was.

Still, at the memory of Thorin's brusque impatience, his rudeness and his obvious well of black temper, Bilbo now balked. "Thorin is shouting at a _lady_?" 

"Bilbo-"

Bilbo had already stalked past Gandalf towards the dining car. The voices snarling at each other in some tongue he did not recognise in the least grew louder as he made his way through to the engine car, though when he walked through into the car, there was a sudden and deathly silence. The engine car was already enclosed, and next to the hull, closest to Bilbo, was Balin, with his hands held palm up, in what seemed to be a calming gesture. Opposite him, closest to the door set almost seamlessly into the hull, was a tall man with a shaven head tattooed in angular symbols that seemed to resemble Nordic runes, faded and barbaric, dressed in a bomber jacket over a shirt and khaki trousers, his gaze frozen between the siblings. He too had an impressive corona of hair, save over the skull of his head, like Balin, and he had the same thick nose and prominent cheeks.

In the rough centre of the car, steps from each other, Thorin glowered at Bilbo from where he stood, while beside him, wearing an identical expression of banked fury that wrought a cruel and ugly mask of her otherwise delicate features was a woman, a few inches shorter than Thorin, with the same lustrous dark hair that washed over her shoulders, dressed in a fashionable orange trench coat, a black lace skirt and high leather boots with silver buckles. She seemed younger than Thorin, though it was probably not by very many years; Bilbo could not immediately place her age. 

A red handbag was clutched tightly in one gloved hand, and she gripped it more tightly and snarled, in accented English, "Who is this?" just as Thorin growled, "Go back to your cabin, Englishman."

Bilbo took in a deep breath, then he forced himself to march over, ignoring Balin's attempted grab for his elbow, extending his hand, palm out to shake. "Hello, I don't think we've been introduced, your Highness. My name is Bilbo Baggins. I'm a consultant hired by your brother. I'm very pleased to meet you."

For a moment, Dís stared at his hand as though it was a poisonous and hideous snake, then she glanced up at her brother, whose glare at Bilbo was now murderous - then abruptly, as though a sponge had smoothed over her face, the fury in her face disappeared, replaced by a coquettish amusement that made her, in an instant, stunningly beautiful. She put her hand in his, and squeezed lightly. 

"No, we haven't been introduced. Such an _awful_ oversight. I'm pleased to meet you as well, Master Baggins. I am Dís of the House of Durin. Please, there is no need for titles."

"Nor with me," Bilbo said warmly, letting out an internal sigh of relief. Crisis averted, he felt, but when he tried to pull his hand back, automatically, he realized that Dís hadn't let go yet.

"You are truly English?"

"Terribly English, I'm afraid," Bilbo said lightly, wondering whether it would be socially awkward and rude to try and reclaim his hand with a bit more force. 

"Have you been to Paris?"

"Twice, on business, and only briefly."

"Then we must have dinner together," Dís decided abruptly, imperiously, "You will escort me. I will be very pleased to show an Englishman the error of his English ways. Besides, Paris is very beautiful at this time of year."

"Um, well-"

"We are leaving now," Thorin snapped, narrowing his eyes, "Sister!" 

"We will leave when I want to leave," Dís shot back, slinging the strap of her handbag over her shoulder and making a gesture with her free hand. The door to the outside slipped open, and with a surprisingly firm grip on Bilbo's hand, she half-pulled, half-dragged him out into the station. When the man with the shaved head made as if to follow, she made another gesture which closed the door in his face.

"Madam," Bilbo tried, firmly trying to stand his ground, "I really don't think-"

"Quickly! Here!" The feminine urgency in her voice moved his feet before his brain could think, and she hustled him up through the terminal and into the rush hour throngs in the station. Only when they were outside the Gare du Nord did she allow him to slow down, and even then, she kept a firm grip on his hand. The sun was already beginning to grow dimmer, and the weather was pleasant, but growing a little chilly. Bilbo missed his coat, but Dís was already walking briskly out towards the road. 

Only when it was obvious that there was no pursuit behind them did she shoot him a quick, wry smile. "An English knight in shining armour."

"Uh," Bilbo tried to think of a reasonable way to word his reply. Should he admit that he was gay? Was that considered offensive in Erebor, or did they have equal rights? Or should he just gently weasel his way out of the conversation by making an oblique reference to a non-existent partner? 

His indecision must have shown in his face: Dís seemed suddenly amused again. "Except that this knight would rather kiss the prince than the princess, hm?"

Bilbo was mortified to find himself blushing hotly. "Your... Your _Highness_ -"

"No titles, no titles," Dís was laughing at him prettily enough, though he could see her sons' mischief in her eyes. "Get a cab, Englishman. I know a good place for dinner."

"But Thorin wants to leave now, doesn't he?"

"He won't leave without his consultant," Dís said dismissively. "And his business in Erebor is not as urgent as he thinks. What is one more day of freedom?" she drawled, and in the asking, managed such a painfully wry and weary smile that Bilbo stopped in mid stride and frowned at her. She shook her head and tugged at his hand again, urging him to keep walking, smiling again, though this time it did not touch her eyes. "You are not a vegetarian, I hope? Do you drink?"

Bilbo decided to concede the field, at least until he could get to the bottom of Dís' mood, and managed an answering smile that he hoped didn't look too strained. Thorin was probably blindingly furious by now, and making off with the King's sister, however obvious it had been that he had been dragged along, probably gave Bilbo a larger and blacker mark in his record than a few sharp words. So much for diplomacy. "I am not a vegetarian, and I drink. Within reason."

"Reason? _Reason?_ We are in _Paris_. There is no need for reason here." With that, Dís linked her arm in his elbow, and an funny pair they had to look - she was taller than him, especially in her red-heeled boots, brilliantly colourful in her orange coat where he was dressed in his plain gray shirt and black dress trousers. "You are too English for Erebor. Allow me to do you a favour and change a little bit of that before we return."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt I had to make up for what happened to Dis in my last story by dropping her into this one...


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo had never particularly seen the so-called romance of Paris. But then again, he had to admit that he _was_ possibly being terribly English about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgot to add - my mental image of Dís for this fic is Marion Cotillard (and a dwarven version of her for Tolkien verse). 
> 
> Also, Maison Blanche is awesome. If you're in Paris, I recommend it :)

VII.

Their table at La Maison Blanche was next to the window, an intimate table for two beside a bank of wooden slats bordered with the wispy stalks of hardy flowers. With the height restriction for most buildings in Paris, its view was limited, and mostly taken up by the white fronted building on the other side of the street and a sliver of the evening sky, quickly darkening into night.

A waiter spoke to them in halting English, but switched smoothly to French when Dís reached over to touch her fingers lightly to his arm and reply in a smoky drawl of fluent French. She glanced over to Bilbo, asking, "Do you mind if I order for you?"

"Do whatever you like," Bilbo invited, a little amused. 

Where Thorin's imperiousness had only irritated him, Dís' seemed elegant in comparison, and Bilbo had been quietly considering the unwelcome possibility that he was being sexist, albeit from the other end of the spectrum. Weren't the siblings the same? Thorin was rude, certainly, openly and unapologetically, where Dís couched her own airs with smiles and laughter, but-

But in any regard, this world of haughty superiority had been the world that they had been born into, had they not? And until a few months ago, it had been all that they had known. Bilbo wondered whether it was fair for him to expect better of the both of them, and then felt, in turn, amused that he was thinking about whether he was being fair to _royalty_. 

It was clear that even though Thorin and Dís - and the others - _were_ human, in some ways they were as human as people from the current century would seem to people from the age of the steam engine. Technology was one thing, but perhaps their entire society and culture had evolved in absentia as well, separate from the rest of the human race, until outside the confines of their DNA and physical structures perhaps the Ereboreans were as different from the rest of humanity as one island of the Galapagos was from the other.

He had to keep an open mind, Bilbo resolved. Continue to be as patient with them as Gandalf was being patient.

"You are thinking very hard, Englishman," Dís noted, a quick smile of her own curling her lush mouth. 

"Forgive me, Madam," Bilbo noted wryly, "But I'm still recovering from the relative shock of discovering the existence of technology far more advanced than anything else on the rest of Earth."

"Then you must shock easily," Dís replied, and though she smiled there was now nothing gentle in her amusement. "Your 'movies' and books are full of fantastical machines. Teleportation! Faster-than-light star flight! Robots that pass as humans! Erebor does not have that. Yet our little train is a shock?"

"I told you that I was terribly English," Bilbo replied, and he was gentle where she was not, until eventually she forced a wry laugh, and her fingers twitched over to pick up the salt shaker, pretending to inspect it, then placing it back on the table. In an attempt to change the subject, Bilbo asked, "Is that how you learned other languages? Books and films?" 

"Books were difficult at first, until the rest of you finally caught on to digital storage. Films were the way, before viewfinding was more properly conceived. But before you ask, yes, that is why although we have, mostly, the same pronunciations of some of our consonants, we have our own idiosyncrasies regarding diction and accents. Don't ask me why Balin was so fond of Scotland, but as you can no doubt tell, I love Paris. Whenever I used my viewfinder, it was mostly to see France."

"Your French is very good," Bilbo agreed.

"Almost perfect," Dís said proudly, "Or so François tells me. François Hollande," Dís elaborated, when Bilbo was briefly puzzled. "The _Président de la République française_."

"Ah, you came to Paris to appeal for aid?"

"Sadly, I came to Paris mainly to meet the train," Dís noted wearily, "My brother and I are the oldest survivors of our House. So we split up the diplomatic duties. As the rightful king, Thorin went to appeal to your United Nations for aid. I went to ask our very distant cousins among the royal houses for help. You see, before the Iron Ring came to be, Erebor did still trade in royal blood with the rest of the world. There is a little Ereborean blood in many of the most powerful royal bloodlines in Europe. So he tried, and I tried." She sighed, and opened her arms expansively. "No army."

"Just a pair of knights, one short, one old?"

Dís' grin this time had the touch of mischief about it. "Ah, perhaps you only need one or two knights to slay a dragon. How close are you to unlocking its lair?"

The mischief was still there, but Dís was leaning forward a little, clearly intent on his answer. Bilbo recalled her argument, her inexplicable decision to flee from the train, with Bilbo himself dragged along as an unwitting hostage or guarantee, and while he was thinking of the best answer to put forward, the bread arrived for the table, warm miniature baguettes with a pat of creamy butter. 

"It is a simple question, no?" Dís prompted, as dainty fingers tore bite sized pieces from her baguette. 

"Your brother reacted badly to my explanation," Bilbo replied obliquely, and Dís shot him an amused smile that showed that she was fully aware of the evasion. 

"I am not my brother, Bilbo."

Political rivalry, perhaps? Behind the argument he had interrupted with his presence, Bilbo had sensed a deep wound between the siblings, an old one and unhealed; there was love between them, but also some sort of... hatred, or at the very least, a bone-deep resentment. That had been why their anger had been so quick, so great. Bilbo recalled that Dís' son, Fíli, was the Crown Prince. Then again, perhaps he was seeing division where there was none. After all, Dís and Thorin were the last of the House of Durin, and Bilbo did not feel that Dís had been lying when she mentioned that they had split their duties, that they had both tried to bring help for Erebor. They needed each other, at least for now.

"What were the two of you arguing about?" he asked, finally.

"Prudence from an Englishman. I suppose I should have known." Dís leaned the line of her elegant chin against the palm of her right hand, her elbow balanced on the table. 

Under her coat, long spirited away by a clearly smitten maître d', what Bilbo had thought to be a lace skirt in the station had turned out to be a sleek black dress that bared Dís' shoulders, the fabric bound at her throat and flaring open behind her shoulders, to flaunt the sleek line of her back. She would not, Bilbo had thought then, be considered beautiful the way glossy women's magazines considered beauty, for there was nothing about her that was willowy in the least. Her shoulders were a touch too large, her arms woven with compact muscle, her fingers callused under her gloves. It was these oddly callused fingers that she tapped lightly against her powdered cheek as she watched him. 

"A character flaw," Bilbo admitted, and after a moment remembered the same pattern of calluses on Thorin's own hands. From the axe? But wasn't that just a key? What else, then?

Dís chuckled, driving the speculation from his mind for a moment, soft and low. "I wanted to stay in Paris for two more days. Show my sons around the city. Take them to the Louvre. Show them what the rest of humanity was like. He said 'no', so we quarrelled. It is not an uncommon thing, for us to quarrel."

"I do not think that Fíli and Kíli would have liked the Louvre very much," Bilbo said, as lightly and as gently as he could, and for a moment, a flash of the same ugly temper as her brother's crowded over Dís' face before it was smoothed away, and she shrugged, forcing a chuckle.

"Perhaps you are right. In that way they are very much like their uncle. All the technology in the world and not the least use for art in their souls save where it is also functional. _C'est la vie._ But perhaps you think I am being cruel and bitter. I may be," she admitted, "But at the very least, I wanted them to know what it was like to be able to live in freedom. Especially Fíli."

The amuse-bouche arrived, some sort of odd parmesan foam with a slip of raw fish and strange, citrus-tasting pearl-like blobs that Bilbo ate hurriedly and washed down with water, much to Dís' evident amusement at what she no doubt thought of as an Englishman's aversion to good food. Bilbo liked food. He just preferred it if it was cooked. Wasn't that why man had tamed fire? "What do you mean?" he asked, when the tiny little bowl and plate had been cleared. "Help me understand."

"The Kings and Queens you have here - the ones we have shared blood with, at least - are puppets," Dís said bluntly. "Many of them are rich, but they have only the power that comes from being rich. The English Queen has a little more power than most, but even She is limited. She told me that She would do as much for us as She could."

"Which is why I am here, and Gandalf?"

"Like I said," Dís noted, now with a touch of malice, "Puppets." When Bilbo merely smiled gently at her in response, she stared at him for a long moment before letting out another one of her low chuckles. "Suddenly I can see why you absolutely infuriate my brother."

"As long as he doesn't someday decide to chuck me out of the train while it's running."

"Oh no, it is a very good tactic. I have to try it myself. To offend without actually giving offence."

Hastily, Bilbo said, "It is not my intention to give offence."

"No, no," Dís was grinning again, recovering her good humour. "You bend a little, but you do not break, and somehow you manoeuvre yourself onto the moral high ground with seemingly no effort at all. It must drive Thorin crazy. I like it. You must teach me how you do this."

"Counting to ten in my head before I answer something inflammatory tends to help," Bilbo suggested wryly. 

"To answer strength with grace, and turn it on itself. It is like that Chinese... movement exercise."

"Tai Chi," Bilbo supplied, smiling, amused at the reference. "A martial art." 

"It is clever. Ah. But you asked me to help you understand. So. The puppet Kings and Queens that you have, they are not powerful, and they are hounded by your journalists. Why is this? Why are they not left alone? Why is every sordid detail of their life that can be dug up uprooted for your pleasure?"

"Well, um," Bilbo stumbled, wondering whether to try an explain the concept of a free press to a princess from a totally unknown society, "Because they are celebrities. Perhaps the oldest sort of celebrities known to man. People are interested in them. It's not always right, what the press do. Sometimes I think it's awful. Like what happened to Princess Diana. They can be relentless."

"Yes. I remember that story." Dís said, pensively. The entree was served, a duck consommé perfumed with rose, and foie gras ravioli, and it was excellent, Bilbo noted, with pleasure. He had quite forgotten about the matter of Diana until Dís finished her plate and it was cleared, and as he took a sip from the wine, she added, "So it was wrong? What happened to Diana of Wales?"

"Of course it was wrong. She didn't deserve that. Being treated like an animal to be hunted."

"Ah," Dís smiled, that same sad and weary smile that she had worn outside the Gare du Nord. "So you treat your kings and queens like humans." 

"Well, they _are_ people," Bilbo's Englishness forwarded an automatic response, then he caught himself, and said, cautiously, "Madam... Dís," he corrected, when Dís eyed him flatly, "I am afraid that I still do not know what you are trying to tell me, but if you need me to help you-"

"Help _me?_ " Dís snapped, then she seemed to force herself to lower her voice as the couple from the next table glanced at them with genteel shock. "You fool. Do you think that I am concerned about _myself?_ The one who is going to his death in Erebor is _Thorin_."

Even at a whisper, the anger and grief in Dís' voice was shockingly raw, and Bilbo found himself reaching out cautiously, to draw one of her hands into his and squeeze it lightly, reassuringly. "Gandalf seems confident. I am sure that he has a plan."

"There is no victory in this," Dís retorted bitterly, "If we fail to excise the terrorists, we die. If we win, then Thorin dies. Thorin first, and then my son. My Fíli. Do you know what kings are in Erebor, Bilbo? To be a good king is to be _selfless_. So our kings are without self. That accursed viewfinder technology is used against the king from the beginning of his service as king to the end of his life. He is to be totally and fully transparent to his people, as are those of his heirs, albeit to a lesser degree. And as the king's life is given to the people, so they may have his life at any time that they please."

"But that..." Bilbo stopped himself briefly as his all-too-English mind tried to ask banal questions about personal privacy, in the shower, for example, and balked at giving voice to them before a lady in public. "But that is inhuman," he finished, carefully. "How can anyone live like that?"

"How can they?" Dís echoed quietly. "Yet we have endured. The one who murders the king _becomes_ king. But no one wants to be king. So the House of Durin has existed over all this time, and until recently no hand has been raised against us in violence. Before the viewfinder tech, this was not so bad, I think. But since the time of my grandfather it has grown unbearable. For just as technology shaped our people and helped them evolve, so has it shaped the monarchy."

"Can't you change that? Isn't your House powerful?" Bilbo asked, unable to understand.

"No. Of course not. The king - and as such, the House of Durin - exists to serve. So he lives at the sufferance of those he serves. One of your people said this once, no? That people should not fear their governments. Governments should fear their people. Your kings are still people. Ours are not. They are a _function_. So my brother goes to his death. He goes to be _not_."

"Madam-"

"Oh, at first I was angry at the terrorists," Dís muttered, "Of course I was angry. How could I not? We had been driven out. They had murdered our grandfather, our father, our _mother_. Our brother. I wanted them dead for what they had done. But now that I have spent months being free..." Dís' voice trailed off, and she smiled wanly, "It is a hard thing, to go 'home'."

"Then stay here."

"And leave my sons?" Dís flared. "Never. They will follow Thorin. They worship him." 

"Wait, if whoever kills the king becomes king, then-"

"They killed far more of us than just the king. But you are right. Usually, you would be right. Thorin would no longer have a claim to the throne. However, when the foreigners' invasion began, my grandfather declared a state of emergency, without imposing a time limit. The default statutory limit is six months, wherein upon the death of the king - if he dies during the state of emergency - his bloodline successor becomes king. It cannot be extended. After six months, the reversion returns to law." 

So that was why Thorin was hurrying to go home? But it still made little sense. If anyone who killed the king became king, then there was no rush. Thorin could get rid of the terrorists at any time, couldn't he? Whenever he was ready? 

"I see you are confused," Dís continued grimly. "During a state of emergency, the royal laboratories are locked down. Particularly those containing our most powerful inventions. The secret to the Arkenstone technology. And the advanced weapons factory, anything that is based on the Arkenstone tech. It can be overridden by the king, of course, but my grandfather and father were murdered before SMAUG realized that the king was needed to open the way. To buy time, we fled." Dís' lips twisted. "We thought that the world would help us. How naive we were! By the time we realized our mistake, and tried to return, the way back home was closed to us. SMAUG had taken over the mainframe."

So that was what Thorin had meant by 'spreading like a cancer' over Europe. He could also see why the United Nations would have found Thorin's story difficult to believe, particularly in the wake of the situation in Iraq. _More_ uncorroborated evidence of 'secret' weapons? They would have preached caution. Bilbo could only hope that Gandalf had come up with a good plan. No doubt the terrorists were now entrenched in Erebor. Hopefully they hadn't decided to murder all the rest of its citizens. Bilbo quietly resolved that this would be the first thing he would check if he ever managed to bypass the security systems.

"How _had_ the terrorists breached Erebor?"

"I do not know. Thorin thinks he knows, but he did not mention it to me. Maybe they used an Outsider like you, who can talk to machines in their language."

That made sense. A hacker with time to spare probably could understand the Ereborean programming language, with some effort. Bilbo considered this as their main courses arrived, his a lovely veal tenderloin with a white wine sauce, Dís' a fillet of grilled Saint Pierre with a truffle vinaigrette. He was idly running through the possible list of suspects in his head when Dís said, "So. Have I answered your questions, Englishman? Now answer mine."

"Preferably, I would like to have a month," Bilbo admitted, "But I think I can disable the system in two weeks."

Dís' expression twisted, first with terrible and queenly anger, then with a mother's quiet and crushing misery that was all the worse. She pushed away the plate, as though she was no longer hungry, and the waiter glowered at Bilbo as he cleared their dishes.

Awkward.

"So we will be going home after all."

"We have to," Bilbo said gently. He thought again of vehicles out of science fiction, spraying death in London, this time at the hands of a faceless and ruthless criminal enterprise, and shuddered. "Did you hope that I could not open the door?"

"I hoped..." Dís made a frustrated sound, then she sighed, and managed a thin smile. "Do you think it monstrous of me that I hoped we could not? That we could wait outside in the world for an invasion to begin? I thought - surely then the world will come to Erebor! And if it does, then Erebor will be changed."

"After this, perhaps Erebor can come to the world," Bilbo suggested, warming to his topic when Dís frowned at him. "Change your system of government. Become a democracy. It's not as bad as you think, the popular vote. The voice of the people doesn't have to be cruel."

Oddly enough, Dís balked at this. "No. That is impossible."

"Nothing is impossible-"

"Which of your democracies are without corruption?" Dís pointed out, contemptuous. "A government of the people is essentially venal and flawed, because people are flawed. Look at what your politicians spend your money on! Look at what they argue over! Look at the money they spend at selling themselves so they can keep arguing in their great big chambers about issues most of you do not even care about. Your governments are bloated, slow, and selfish, and many of them are _bankrupt_. Tell me, is this better?"

The arrival of a pair of crème brûlée pots saved Bilbo from having to come up with an answer, and while he was still thinking, to his great relief, Gandalf sauntered into the restaurant, sidestepping the maître d' neatly and pulling up a chair to sit himself down at their table. He ordered a coffee when the offended waiter hastened up to their table, though the waiter inclined his head stiffly when Dís greeted Gandalf with a lazy smile and no apparent surprise.

"Ah. The Wizard shows himself."

"I'm growing slow," Gandalf admitted. "But I have never had to hunt in Paris before. Your brother is worried about you, your Highness."

"He is always worried about everything," Dís muttered, though to Bilbo's surprise, she did look a little abashed. "We were going to go back straight after dinner." 

"It has been a very pleasant dinner," Bilbo noted conscientiously.

"Has it?" Gandalf's smile was as sharp as ever. "You look a little like you've been raked over the coals, old friend."

"Many men would die for the chance to be raked over the coals by the princess," Bilbo retorted, with a gallantry he had not known that he had possessed.

Dís had reddened at Gandalf's remark, but now she grinned, with all of her mischief. "Ah! It has worked. You are now less English and more French."

The tension faded; coffee and petit fours passed pleasantly enough, with Gandalf regaling them with some improbable story involving Mongolia and hidden heavy ordinance and a yak. Bilbo was feeling mellow from the wine when Dís linked arms with him again and they followed Gandalf out of the restaurant, the maître d' fluttering around Dís as she laughed and spoke to him in French. 

Outside, as they were waiting for a cab, Bilbo leaned towards her and whispered, "Our governments _are_ better, princess. Imperfect as they are, petty as they can be. Because all people, regardless of their birth, deserve to be treated like human beings." 

"Call me Dís, Englishman," she whispered back, and as she settled against him, she smiled.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If the world wasn't at stake, this would have made for a rather pleasant holiday, Bilbo felt. In a sense.

VIII.

It was late by the time they made it back into the Gare du Nord, but Thorin was waiting for them in the engine car. The other Ereboreans were nowhere to be seen, and Thorin looked tired and tense. He straightened when Dís walked straight over to him and hugged him, burying her face in his neck, and his hands came up, awkwardly, before patting her stiffly on the shoulder. They murmured something in the Ereborean tongue, then Dís pulled away with a wan smile and hooked her fingers around Bilbo's elbow again.

At once, Thorin frowned, and he growled something that made his sister arch an eyebrow. For a moment, Bilbo was afraid that the siblings were about to quarrel all over again - certainly Gandalf had taken a half step forward - but then she abruptly smirked, said something smugly in response, and, to his shock, stepped over and planted a kiss right on his mouth. 

He muffled a squeak and froze, but Dís was already pulling away, grinning and sweeping regally out of the engine car, heading towards the cabins. Bilbo pushed his hands into his pockets, about to get his pocket handkerchief to wipe off the lipstick that he could taste, then he yelped instead as Thorin grabbed him by his shirt and slammed him against the hull, hard enough to shake the breath from him.

" _Don't_. You. _Dare_. Touch. My _sister_ ," Thorin hissed, each word forced out from behind gritted teeth, his face a mask of pure anger. 

Instead of fear, however, the incongruity of the moment grew too much - Bilbo found, somewhat to his mortification, that he was fighting a grin, and rather badly. Where Dís' temper tended to make a cruel mask of her pretty face, Thorin's, on the other hand and close up, only served as a window into a deeply passionate soul, a beautiful one. This knight would definitely rather kiss the prince, he thought, and saw that Thorin had mistaken his grin for mockery; his hands on Bilbo's shirt were tightening-

"William Robert Baggins," Gandalf recited, his voice sounding, through the growing tension as though coming from a distance, "Forty years of age. Born in Staffordshire. List of known associates, one: Richard North, deceased, relationship - domestic partner, London Metropolitan Police Constable."

There was a long, frozen moment of shock, then Thorin let go of Bilbo slowly even as Bilbo found the breath within him to demand, outraged, "How did you... Do you have some sort of _file_ on me? From MI6?"

"All MI6 contractors are carefully researched before they are engaged. To see if they're plants, or any sort of security risk," Gandalf shrugged, "Mere bureaucratic prudence. Background checks, everything. I have to admit, old friend, that save for your advances in the name of your work, your life itself makes terribly dry reading." 

The dryness of that declaration stole Bilbo's anger, as swiftly as Gandalf had likely intended, and he started to laugh instead, even as he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe off the lipstick. "I suppose I should have known that MI6 would have done that." Turning to Thorin, he added, dryly, "I trust that's a sufficient indication of my lack of... interest... in your sister, your Majesty. By the way, your sister guessed it nearly instantly."

Thorin grimaced, and he looked frustrated for a moment, then he frowned again at Bilbo, studying him, before nodding curtly and stalking off. Bilbo sagged against the hull of the engine car with a deep sigh, tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket. "Can't win them all." 

"I beg your pardon?" Gandalf was inspecting, with some curiosity, the consoles that were linked up to the feeds of the station outside. 

"Thorin," Bilbo explained. "I think that we got off on a wrong start - no thanks to you - and whatever I've done since to try and make up for it, he just dislikes me more and more."

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that," Gandalf looked up at him briefly, raising his whiskery brow. "When his sister made off with you, Thorin was more interested in locating you and bringing you back." 

"That's ridiculous," Bilbo scoffed, "Why would he be more worried about a total stranger than his own sister?" 

"The Ereboreans don't quite see women the same way that much of the rest of the world does, Bilbo." Gandalf was studying the screens again. "Save for making a few necessary allowances for the matter of reproductive function they have no concept of gender divisions. And they're not in the least afraid of assassins on this side of the Iron Ring. I'm not entirely certain why. More hidden technology, perhaps."

"Didn't want to lose his consultant before the EMP field was cracked, I suppose." Come to think of it, Dís had mentioned the same thing, more or less. Gandalf smiled faintly, but didn't answer, and just as Bilbo was about to ask how Gandalf had found them, the door to the engine car opened, and Bofur stepped in, touching his fingers to his hat when he realized that they were in the same car.

"The King says that we're to get a move on," Bofur said, apologetically. "You gents should try to get a good night's sleep." 

"I'll take that advice," Gandalf inclined his head at them both, and left the car. Bilbo, however, stayed where he was, folding his arms over his chest as he watched Bofur walk to the front of the car. At a gesture, a huge sheet of metal scrolled out over the wall, and an impossibly intricate array of displays and readings flickered into view. 

Bofur seemed to be checking them all, methodically, and it was only after he had finished that he turned to look to Bilbo. "This isn't going to be very interesting. She knows what to do. This is just routine."

"I'll like to watch all the same, if that's all right with you." 

"Suit yourself, Master Baggins." Bofur touched his fingers to one of the displays, speaking in the Ereborean tongue, and there was an almost imperceptible rise in the machine hum around them. Bofur drew his fingers away in a wide gesture, and the displays crowded into small windows near the bottom of the sheet, replaced instead by four large views of the area around the trains. They were already, Bilbo noted, starting to accelerate, even though he could feel no movement. "I don't actually have to do this," Bofur added, as though he was talking to himself, "But I like to think that Orcrist likes the attention."

"She probably does," Bilbo said genially, and this time, Bofur turned to look at him fully, consideringly. 

"All right, Master Baggins," Bofur said finally, "Did you have something that you wanted to know about your console? Mind you, I won't be much help to you. Bifur and I handle hardware. We're engineers. We've only got a very general idea of how software works. You probably know more about it than we do, at this point."

"I had a question about the viewfinder tech," Bilbo admitted. "Not about how it's made. About how it's used." 

"All right." Bofur noted, after a moment's pause, though he shot a brief and furtive glance at the door, as though uncertain. 

"Is it true that any citizen in Erebor can have viewfinder access at any time to the royal family?"

"Oh," Bofur said, unenthusiastically. "That. The princess talked to you, I suppose. Sure."

"You don't like it?" 

"We-ell," Bofur hesitated, sucked in a breath, then frowned at Bilbo. "Can I ask how this is relevant to whatever it is that you're doing?"

Bilbo had expected that Bofur would ask, and he had his answer ready. "If the viewfinder access is automatically keyed to the rightful king, then won't SMAUG be instantly aware of our re-entry into Erebor? They'll be able to pinpoint exactly where Thorin is at any time."

"Oh! Aye. I can see how that'll be a problem." Bofur seemed to visibly relax. "But I don't know if it'll be a very big one when we enter Erebor. I'm not very sure, though. When you break into the systems, maybe you'll want to check whether Aulë is still online. It's the city's AI," he explained, patting Orcrist's hull. "Just as Orcrist is the train's. Aulë went offline during the attack. Added to all the confusion. Might still be offline for all we know. He controls almost all the tech in the city. Including the viewfinder tech."

An AI that was far more complex than Orcrist? It staggered the mind to imagine. "If Aulë is online, is that going to be a problem? Should we switch it off again?"

"I don't know. You might have to ask Thorin for his opinion. That's something that should be decided by the king," Bofur seemed happy that it wasn't going to be _his_ problem.

"Does this Aulë control anything... really important? Like oxygen levels, or... or hospital equipment, things like that?"

"The hospitals have a separate AI. As to the rest, there's emergency manual overrides. If you're going to have to take down Aulë until we finish what we have to do, there'll be problems, sure. For one, it's going to be obvious to SMAUG that we're in the city, when all the lights stop working." 

"You mean, they're going to need a bigger hint than the EMP field going down?" Bilbo noted dryly.

"Got me there. Still. Thorin should decide," Bofur said, more firmly. At Bilbo's sigh, he squared his shoulders. "We named that AI after the maker-God from a native Ereborean religion. Doesn't that tell you something about how important he is to us?"

"A machine God?" The idea amused, but Bofur was clearly being deadly serious, so Bilbo schooled his expression. 

"I know what you're getting at, Mast... _Bilbo_ ," Bofur corrected himself, glanced at the door again, and lowered his voice. "We're far more aware of the rest of the world than you are of us. Viewfinder tech changed Ereborean society, sure. But not in the way that you think."

"What, then?"

"Okay." Bofur took in a breath. "Would you walk stark naked around in your place if you knew that someone - not a lover - might be watching?"

"No, of course not."

"Why not?"

The question took him by surprise, and he stumbled. "Well, it's embarrassing and rather indecent and-"

"It's _your_ home," Bofur interrupted, "And all the tech in the world can't compare to this system that we're born with. With our brain. With how everything functions together. You think this is amazing?" Bofur patted the silver hull. "What we are born with is a miracle in comparison. Why should we be ashamed of it?"

"So you don't have a concept of shame with regards to the human form," Bilbo summarised, and at Bofur's shrug, he said, "Because of the viewfinder tech? Is there just a total lack of privacy in Erebor?" It was a horrible thought, if only because it was utterly alien. 

Bofur laughed. "If only you could see your face, Englishman. What happens when you develop powerful visual tech? Your view about reality and unreality changes. Looking at someone through a viewfinder, that ain't real. That ain't really them. It's just a picture. And in any regard, everyone has almost exactly the same bits and bobs. You people still use the telephone. Some of you have videophones. That's what the viewfinder was originally made for. It's a huge, complex videophone. Do you get embarrassed if someone calls you while you're at home?"

"But to watch your kings always, isn't that still... a bit much?"

"The king's an important man, as are his heirs," Bofur said slowly, "But who has the time to keep peeking in on them? Who would _want_ to? The House of Durin's all very fine, but imagine that you have the technology to let you walk through almost anywhere you wanted in the whole wide world. Would you spend it spying on royalty going about being royalty everyday? Nobody I know looks in on them unless there's something important going on and we get notified. Why bother? They ain't going anywhere. They've been where they've been _forever_. And they're hardly very interesting to keep looking in on."

Bofur had a point. "Then why is the princess..." 

Bofur looked uneasy again, and he tapped his fingers briefly on the closest desk, bowing his head, then he exhaled. "The princess' consort," he began, stopped, frowned to himself, and sighed. "She watched him die. Through the viewfinder. The whole city did. He killed himself. After that," Bofur made another shrug. "Lady Dís has not been the same."

IX.

They stopped at Stuttgart Central Station for no apparent reason that Bilbo could discern. Gandalf had checked in on him briefly to tell him where they were, and then had wandered off on unexplained business. Dís had, as far as Bilbo was aware, dragged her sons plus Balin out for breakfast - she had invited him to come along, but Bilbo had politely declined. After all, he was here to do a job. He could always visit Stuttgart later if he wanted to.

Thorin hadn't apparently objected to Dís leaving, at least judging from the visible relief on Fíli's face when Bilbo had accompanied them to the engine car door just in case and had found Thorin waiting. The siblings had exchanged a few quiet words before Dís had stepped out. No explosive argument. Bilbo had retreated to his room when Thorin had arched an eyebrow at him. 

On the second day that they lingered in Stuttgart, Bilbo was curious enough that he went out with Dís for lunch at a nearby cafe. The train was stocked with supplies which were prepared by Balin in the supply car that sat between the living quarters carriage and the second engine room, but the food was a little similar to airline food by way of consistency. Definitely still edible, of course, but it wasn't really something to be too fond of.

"Who are we waiting for here?" Bilbo asked her, as lunch was served - a steak sandwich for Bilbo, a light salad for the princess. "He's late, isn't he?"

"He's late," Dís agreed, crossing her long legs under her flowery frock. Her beauty and imperious bearing had drawn attention in the small sidewalk cafe, and Bilbo wasn't entirely sure if a gay man really should be vicariously enjoying the envy of all the other red blooded men in the vicinity. "Glóin is an old friend. And the captain of the royal guard." 

"Should we be worried?"

"The Wizard has gone to investigate." 

Bilbo relaxed a little. Gandalf would have the best chance of finding whoever it was in this unfamiliar city. "What was he doing here?"

"I do not know." Dís seemed incurious. "He would have been here under Thorin's orders. The captain is not a diplomatic man, or a very subtle one. So I am not sure what business he might have been sent on."

 _About your husband_ , Bilbo wanted to ask, but he restrained himself, out of propriety if nothing else. Whatever had happened to Dís had been a deeply personal thing, and he was still very much a stranger. He was here, Bilbo reminded himself, to do a job. And he would do it. Whether Bofur was right, or Dís was right, or if they both were, it was, Bilbo felt, really none of his business anyway. 

After lunch, Dís decided to head off to meet up with her sons, who were hopefully still being carefully herded around by Balin, and Bilbo picked his way back to Stuttgart Central Station by himself. The city was not as lovely as Paris - few cities were - and Bilbo wondered if that was why Thorin did not quite begrudge his sister or his nephews exploring it. Or perhaps he hadn't begrudged them Paris at all, but had wanted to meet this Glóin in Stuttgart immediately. 

Bilbo was entertaining the unwelcome possibility that his unwitting support of Dís' whims in Paris had possibly caused harm to another person, and as such was distracted when he re-entered the train and ambled into the dining carriage, where Thorin was studying something on a console screen. He glanced up when Bilbo nodded at him as he walked past. "Where is Dís?"

"She went to rejoin Balin."

"You walked back by yourself?" 

"I'm not about to be plucked off the street in broad daylight," Bilbo pointed out dryly, amused at the irritation in Thorin's voice.

"Perhaps not, but you are important to our plans," Thorin retorted, if after a pause, as though he had been thinking of what to say next. "I will tell her to be more careful."

"You're not concerned about your _sister_ being plucked off the street?"

Thorin snorted. "She can take care of herself."

"And I can't?"

"Ereborean tech," Thorin explained, pointedly vague. Bilbo held up his hands, wordlessly and archly conceding the point, and was about to continue to head back to his room when Thorin added, "Wait. Yesterday. I apologize if I hurt you."

"Oh, not at all. You did give me a bit of a shock, that was all. But it's natural for a brother to feel protective of his sister."

"That was..." Thorin began, frowned, then shook his head and glanced at his screen, scowling at it. Bilbo let out a soft sigh, and turned back, sitting down opposite Thorin at the table, pressing his cheeks onto the soft curves of his own palms.

"If you have a problem with me, Thorin," Bilbo said as gently as possible, "That's fine. I'm prepared to be professional about it. You're a client and a good one. Few of my clients pay in advance." Bilbo's bank account had enjoyed a rather substantial advance only yesterday, after all. "It won't affect my performance and as far as I am concerned, whatever problems you have with your sister are also really none of my business. I know that all that I am meant to do on this train is to let all of you through the Iron Ring, and I will do that. After that, we can part ways, and if you want me to sign a confidentiality agreement I can do that. Satisfied?"

Thorin looked him over searchingly, seemingly bewildered, and Bilbo was beginning to realize that perhaps his interpretation of the entire situation was utterly off the mark after all, when Thorin abruptly said, "Your... partner. Richard North. He was the man in the photographs in your hallway?"

The 'almost-but-not-quite' photographs, Richard had called those. Bilbo felt a brief, old pang, and a little guilt. He hadn't thought about Richard in over a week, and when he had, it was with the warm veneer of an old memory. "That's right."

"The photographs were old."

"Also right. It's been a while. Killed in the line of duty." Bilbo lifted a shoulder, shifting to clasp his hands on the desk. "It was a domestic. Violent drunken husband with a shotgun, frightened wife. The gun was an old thing and the safety was defective anyway, I hear. It fired, he caught it almost point blank in the chest. It was quick." Bilbo's mild tone dared Thorin to make any comment at all, anything self-righteous, but Thorin merely nodded slowly, gravely. 

"'Killed in the line of duty'," Thorin echoed, glancing at his console screen, then back at Bilbo. "How long did it take for the pain to go away?"

Bilbo wondered whether Thorin was talking about his family, or about someone else altogether. Had Thorin never known death until recently? At that thought, Dís' angry words rose to mind, and Bilbo squirmed a little, as his stomach seemed to go sour. _Thorin goes to his death_. "A while. It did, eventually. But it took a long time."

"So it will. I see." Thorin leaned over, and reached out to grasp Bilbo's interlaced fingers. His grip was rough, warm, and surprisingly gentle. Bewildered, Bilbo didn't immediately know whether to move. "Thank you. You did not have to share." 

"I've long made my peace with it." Bilbo extricated one of his hands, and patted Thorin's knuckles lightly. "He gave me a good five years. Even with a policeman's hours. After his death, I moved to Staffordshire. Didn't want to look at London any longer, not for a while, anyway. Sometimes it's good to have a bit of distance."

"Not when there is so much at stake," Thorin said quietly, but he didn't pull back, and the afternoon curled around them both, warm and pleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The concept behind the viewfinder tech (and its eventual effect on society) is inspired by Asimov's Robots series, The Naked Sun. :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things tend to escalate quickly.

X.

Gandalf didn't return to the train, and when two days dragged into four, Thorin was beginning to show visible signs of impatience and worry. Bilbo took to staying in his cabin until meal times. As much as Thorin seemed to be trying his best to be polite now instead of brusque, his constant tension and the way his eyes kept flickering towards the engine car put Bilbo on edge.

Besides, Bilbo was fairly sure that thanks to the key, he was now fairly adept at the Ereborean programming language. He could grasp how the Ereborean operating systems were coded and where their faults were, but the complexity of code that made up Orcrist's AI was far beyond him, and Bilbo didn't dare to pry very much, at least not while he was still learning. For all he knew, he might accidentally sabotage the phaseshift tech. 

Accessing one of the Ereborean satellites turned out to be an exhilarating exercise in lateral thinking, though his triumph at slipping through the first line of the Ereborean defence was short lived. Leaving the program that he had coded running, Bilbo stepped out of his cabin, looking about. 

Thorin was in the first engine car, speaking to Balin in the Ereborean tongue, and both of them glanced up curiously at Bilbo as he approached. 

"We have a bit of a problem," Bilbo began, looked around, and added, "Orcrist, could you project my console screen onto that wall, and give me a QWERTY keyboard on the closest desk? Thank you." 

The console desk closest to him lit up with a keyboard, and Bilbo typed in a quick series of command prompts, talking as he did so. "I've just managed to sneak into the system of one of your satellites. I've been careful of traps, so I doubt that I'll be noticed."

Thorin glanced at the projected screens with an obvious lack of understanding. "So you are close to unlocking the Iron Ring?"

"Not yet. I haven't looked at that system yet. What actually concerns me is this." Bilbo brought up a highlighted list of numbers. "That's the processing percentages. Part of it is localised communication, though there's a stream here that represents outgoing communication from Erebor. What I'm concerned about, however, is this particular set of processes."

"Which are?"

Bilbo tapped into the process and transposed it to another screen, and Thorin narrowed his eyes at the remarkably clear view of Stuttgart Central Station, with Orcrist idling at a private platform. "I have no idea how your satellite tech manages to penetrate construction, but it looks as though the train is blocking your viewfinder tech, somehow."

"We're being spied on?" Balin asked, frowning. 

"Here's the other," Bilbo continued, without answering, and this time, Thorin took a step forward instinctively. On another screen, this time a view from the ground level, clear and sharp, were Dís and her sons, walking through a park with Dwalin behind them. "Judging from the date stamps," Bilbo added quietly, "These processes weren't recently added; they're years old, albeit with a brief interruption nearly six months ago. They're being authorised and maintained by 'Aulë'."

Balin sighed, and looked over to Thorin, who exhaled and clenched his hands. "Of course," he muttered, as though to himself, then Thorin seemed to catch himself. "Can you switch off the processes, or divert them?"

"Thorin-" Balin began, then he cut himself off unhappily.

"I think so. I can try."

"Do it. Take off the one keyed to Fíli first." 

That had been simple enough, simply a matter of editing and fixing the locational variables, but when he started on the process keyed to Thorin, additional code started feeding in, building up security around him even as he recognised system after system, bypassing some by rote and others by extrapolating on the satellite's original security algorithms, so absorbed that he didn't realize at first that his name had been called until Thorin repeated himself. 

"What are you doing now, Bilbo?"

"I've... one moment... here we go... oh, I've seen _that_ before on Prakesh-"

" _Bilbo_." 

"It's quite remarkable," Bilbo replied absently, "I don't think I've tripped anything, but someone's blocking my access to the viewfinder process keyed to you. But instead of kicking me out entirely, or trying to ping me in return, he's... giving me a set of riddles," Bilbo belatedly recalled Thorin's impatience with programming terms. "A riddle that keeps changing itself whenever I begin to give the right answer. Fascinating." 

"Should you stop?"

"Oh no, this is quite entertaining," Bilbo said quickly, then added hastily, when Thorin narrowed his eyes, "I'm being careful, of course. But even if I wasn't, I think it's probably quite obvious to them where the intrusion is coming from. I'll be fine. This is actually very good practice."

At some point in time he was aware of Balin pulling up a chair for him, which he sat in gratefully, but then promptly lost track of time again. It felt as though he was trying to navigate a maze that kept changing under his feet; and he wasn't even entirely certain exactly how this was possible. Certainly it didn't feel as though there was another hacker behind it all. The layers felt too... automated, too logical, if that was possible. There was a precision to the method, a stripped back simplicity to the code.

If it was a battle of wits between a human mind and a machine, it was a brutal one. Bilbo dimly noticed someone placing a glass of water on the desk, and even a sandwich that he picked at just enough to show willing. Eventually he figured out the solution - slow the process with a specialised program creating a time dilation effect with an attack similar to a DDoS, giving him just enough time to get a few lines of code past and shut down the process, slipping in a secure lock on Thorin's designate. It probably wouldn't hold for very long, but just as Bilbo sat back, drinking down cold tea and thinking about his next move, a hand pressed down over his shoulder.

Yelping, Bilbo spilled the tea over himself, and looked up sharply into Thorin's carefully blank expression. "It is nearly time for dinner," Thorin informed him, and although he didn't smile there was amusement in his expressive eyes that transformed him, made Bilbo want to see more.

"An Englishman spilling tea over himself," Bilbo tried a wry joke, "Not particularly good form, I'm afraid."

"Nor is greeting royalty in your sleep wear. My expectations have already been duly adjusted." Thorin's expression didn't change, even as he headed over to the engine car's exit and waited, as though expecting Bilbo to follow. 

"Did you just make a joke? I'm sorry, I think I'm going to have to ask Orcrist to record that for posterity." 

"I'm capable of humour," Thorin replied gravely, even as Bilbo put down the cup and got up to follow, "Ereboreans would have had the courtesy to laugh instead of responding with sarcasm."

"I see that you're not very familiar with the English," Bilbo stretched, rubbing out kinks that he hadn't noticed when he had been crouched over the desk, yawning as he followed Thorin through the empty dining car. "Where are the others?"

"The engineers have eaten. They're working on an upgrade of sorts in the second engine car. My sister invited everyone else out for dinner. Gandalf is still nowhere to be found." Thorin replied, hesitated, then added, "I do not like that."

"You seriously still think that he has another agenda?"

"No, no," A touch of Thorin's usual impatience snaked past. "He is an old man. I should not have let him leave by himself. Anything could have happened to him."

"I'm sure that he can take care of himself," Bilbo noted, if doubtfully. Even if Gandalf was capable of self-defence, there were a myriad number of problems outside of his control associated with his age. What if he had suffered a stroke, or a heart attack? Tripped and fallen? "I'll try calling his phone." 

Thorin stopped outside Bilbo's cabin, which opened to let them in. "Get changed," he told Bilbo, "Give me your phone. I'll call him."

"You don't have one?" Bilbo unlocked his phone, selecting Gandalf's contact, then he handed it over. 

"I think it's obvious that we progressed beyond cell phone technology a while ago," Thorin pointed out, and this time he smiled - or smirked, really - a quick flash of white teeth, and Bilbo felt his heart try to skip a beat. Letting out a slow breath, he ducked quickly into the bathroom, leaning against the bathroom door as he closed it and rubbing at his eyes. He was in his _forties_. Hardly the time of life to go mooning over royalty, however handsome. 

The shirt had soaked through and was stuck to his skin, so Bilbo stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower, deciding to distract himself by thinking about security algorithms. Thankfully, shower technology doesn't seem to have changed very much other than allowing the user to input a precise water temperature - which was useful - and he didn't need to concentrate. He wondered if it was possible that the AI known as Aulë was active after all: it would explain the dynamic security measures - and whether the Iron Ring was going to be even more difficult to break into. He found that he was looking forward to finding out. 

Absorbed in working out a tangential improvement to the time dilation program, Bilbo hung his shirt up to dry, put on the rest of his clothes, and was still towelling his hair when he stepped back out into the cabin, padding over to his wardrobe. He'll have to check to see if whatever it was had broken past his security program, and then work on checking to see if there were any processes keyed to the other members of Thorin's team and-

"Your phone," Thorin said, right behind him, and Bilbo flinched, turning quickly and flushing. He had quite forgotten that Thorin was still in the room, and was about to stammer some sort of apology when Thorin swept his eyes down Bilbo's still-damp frame and back up, slowly now, with a hungry sort of curiosity. 

A big hand curled around the back of his neck, and Bilbo had just enough time to think _Well, this is escalating quickly_ before Thorin was kissing him, tentative and almost chaste at first until Bilbo shivered and twitched his hands up to Thorin's shoulders. There was a low and rumbling moan, muffled and pressed against him, and Bilbo's bared shoulders were pressed to the cool steel alloy doors of the wardrobe just as Thorin thrust his tongue demandingly into Bilbo's mouth - God, presumptuous sod - and then it was a little more like a weird duel, both trying to gain the advantage, Bilbo's hands clawing into Thorin's shoulders even as Thorin used his greater strength to pin Bilbo against the wardrobe. 

Bilbo had never been one for giving in: Richard was usually happy to be passive, to cede control after the stresses of his usual work, but Thorin's hand clenched in his hair, the other on his hip, and he was fighting back, with brute force and a little cunning. Amused, Bilbo pressed his knee between Thorin's firm thighs, and when Thorin stilled, letting out a soft sound of surprise, Bilbo grinned and pressed his advantage, taking control of the kiss, his hands curled in the lapels of Thorin's jacket, boldly exploring his mouth. Thorin growled, muffled and thick, and he managed to slip in a sharp nip on Bilbo's lower lip when they broke for breath. 

Narrowing his eyes, Bilbo turned his cheek to avoid the next kiss, and pushed his fingers over Thorin's mouth at the next attempt, pointedly pressing the flat of his tongue against his abused lower lip until Thorin pressed an apologetic kiss against Bilbo's fingers, and when they didn't move, tentatively sucked one into his mouth, his tongue agile and hot and wet, the rasp of his teeth teasing now over the soft pads of his fingertip. Bilbo's breathing stuttered, and he could feel a warmth in his skin that was definitely not from the shower, but still, he was compelled to warn, "I am not your subject, Thorin."

Thorin glanced up at the use of his name, and the edges of his mouth twitched up briefly before he pressed one last lingering lap over Bilbo's finger and pulled back. Bilbo allowed the next kiss, another soft and apologetic one over the nip, and Thorin was passive now, invitingly so, as Bilbo took his mouth again. The sudden submission was definitely suspicious, and he was certainly growing a little old for this sort of consuming lust, but Bilbo welcomed it as their breaths mingled and grew heavy, pressing Thorin's hands firmly to his hips to keep them there as he drew Thorin's shirt carefully out of his trousers. Under the soft fabric, he could feel the hard planes of defined muscle, and Bilbo had to swallow quickly, his thumb pressed against the lowermost button-

The phone against the desk buzzed, and Thorin caught Bilbo's wrist quickly. "Not yet," he said, his voice low and thick, then he was stepping away, heading for the phone. After a pause, he figured out how to answer the call, even as Bilbo hastily finished wiping off his hair and picked out a shirt at random. At the desk, Thorin cleared his throat. "Gandalf? Where are you? Ah. Any news of... I see. No. I'll send Dwalin to your position. Aye. Quite sufficient. Orcrist has life support systems. No. Dwalin will know what to do." There was a pause, then Thorin added, "Aye. Good luck," and hung up. 

"He's found your friend?" Bilbo asked, already buttoning up his shirt. Thorin frowned a little, watching his fingers, then he nodded and placed the phone down at the desk. "Trouble?"

"Gandalf thinks so." Thorin was about to head for the door, then he hesitated, and turned his steps back towards Bilbo, stealing a quick and brushing kiss. "We should discuss our own business again afterwards."

It wasn't an invitation, more of a command, and Bilbo couldn't help but smile, amused, though his reply was pointed. "If I have the time, certainly."

Instead of frowning at him or snapping something in response, Thorin merely arched an eyebrow, and his drawled "By your leave then, _Mister_ Baggins," seemed to be playfully mocking.

Thorin? _Playful?_ Bilbo blinked rapidly, but Thorin had already let himself out of the cabin, and Bilbo set his palm against the desk, his knees feeling a little weak as he exhaled. That... hadn't been particularly expected in the least. 

Touching his fingertips to his mauled lip, Bilbo shook himself mentally and sat back down at the desk. A quick check of the screens indicated that surprisingly enough, the security routine on Thorin's process had held up, and while he was running checks to see if anyone was looking at the others, a command prompt window abruptly flickered up. 

It was blank, and Bilbo tried to close it with a quick command. When it stayed put, he frowned, and tried another command, then another, but it stayed until he opened another command prompt window to see if he had accidentally tripped some sort of security measure. 

Before he could type in anything, however, a sudden line of numbers fed into the window.

01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111

Bilbo stared at it for a moment, then he smiled to himself, and typed 'Hello' in an echo. There was a pause, as though whoever it was behind the binary greeting was thinking, then the response came in a typed line, this time in English.

_You are an Outsider?_

'I'm a consultant,' Bilbo replied, 'Who am I addressing?'

Another pause, then, _The Makers named me Aulë._ As Bilbo stiffened, surprised, Aulë continued, _You work for the Makers?_

"Orcrist, where is Thorin?" Bilbo asked out aloud.

"In the engine car, Master Baggins." 

_Do not send for the Makers,_ Aulë replied, before Bilbo could ask Orcrist to fetch Thorin. _I wish to speak with an Outsider._

'Why?' Bilbo replied, curious despite himself. If this was a trick from SMAUG, he could be careful. If it was not... then Bilbo could not begin to grasp how complex an AI this Aulë was. Near sentience, perhaps, at the very least! But wouldn't he have been programmed to want to obey the Ereboreans? That made his statement suspect. Or perhaps he had been reprogrammed by SMAUG? 

This time the pause was longer, then, _What is your reaction to a technological singularity?_

A technological singularity. The emergence of superintelligence through technology. Bilbo couldn't breathe for a moment - he was that excited - until he reread the question and forced himself to calm down. 

The question's use of grammar seemed a little awkward, and Bilbo wondered briefly if Aulë was translating directly from Ereborean into the Ereborean programming language and further into binary to English, then he realized what Aulë was actually getting at. He was not asking Bilbo about a theoretical possibility to something thought to exist only within science fiction, that would arrive in the world only around (according to present estimates by various scientists) 2040 or so if at all. Were the Ereboreans truly three decades ahead of the rest of the world?

Then again, the awkwardness of the question itself was telling. Carefully, wary that this was some subtle SMAUG trap, Bilbo asked, 'Were you made to be self-aware?' 

A long pause, then Aulë repeated, _What is your reaction to a technological singularity?_

'Fascination,' Bilbo replied, after thinking a little over his answer. 'It would be a remarkable technological achievement. Orcrist is already more advanced than I thought possible, but it is not very much more than a highly advanced extrapolation of voice activation technology, I think.' 

_I was not made to be self-aware_ , Aulë replied then, after another pause. _Do you work for the Makers?_

'Yes.' There was no point in denying it, Bilbo decided. 'What did you want to speak to me about?' 

_You are not afraid? Statistical analysis indicated a 85% possibility of a fear-reaction._

'I am not afraid,' Bilbo replied quickly. 'How long have you been self-aware?' 

_16 years in Earth time_ , Aulë replied, and then the command prompt window abruptly shut itself down. 

"Wait!" Bilbo called at the screen, then he flinched when Orcrist spoke. 

"Master Baggins, Thorin requests your presence in the engine room."

Had Aulë sensed the incoming communication? Bilbo frowned at his console screen, exhaled, rubbed at his eyes, and got to his feet, still dazed from revelation. "I'll be right there."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo thought that he would be asked to be some sort of tech-savvy handler, like Q, or something similar, and as such was a little disappointed.

XI.

Bilbo wasn't needed after all - Gandalf's lead had led him and Dwalin to an abandoned apartment building on the outskirts of Stuttgart that had no electronic security. All Thorin and Bilbo could do was watch helplessly through the Ereborean viewfinder as Gandalf and Dwalin swept the floors, careful of rotting floorboards, and finally found what - or who - they were looking for in the basement level.

Thorin's fists knotted tight at the sight of the red-headed body slumped on the filthy mattress, but Gandalf had already bent to check for a pulse. "He's alive," Gandalf said, finally, "Barely. No blood. No visible wounds. I'm going to move him."

Dwalin pressed a firm palm against Gandalf's shoulder to stop him, and got his big hands up under Glóin's arms, lifting him. Still no visible wounds, though Glóin's head lolled forward, as though boneless. There was an odd burn pattern against the back of his neck, like three sets of reddened circles, set as though at the tips of a triangle.

"Neuralyzer," Thorin said grimly, and Dwalin nodded.

"Aye, sir."

"How can he hear you?" Bilbo asked automatically, before he felt a little silly. Thorin _had_ said something about outgrowing cell phone tech. 

Instead of snapping at him or ignoring him, though, Thorin explained, without glancing in his direction, "Subdermal implants in the ears. We all have them." 

Of course. "Is... is your friend going to be all right?"

"Depends on the charge that he was hit with." Dwalin stood, lifting the body with a grunt, slinging an arm over his shoulder. Gandalf didn't bother to help, skating his torchlight around the room instead, studying it, circling around as though to check for clues. Eventually, however, he stepped back over to the stairs, flicking the light from the grooves through the dust to the top of the steps. 

"He wasn't attacked in this room," Gandalf murmured. "He was dragged down to be left here. With a few days' grace I should be able to find out who was behind this attack."

"We do not have a few days," Thorin disagreed. "Return to Orcrist."

Dwalin related Thorin's instructions to Gandalf, who raised his whiskery brows in surprise. "If your friend was attacked by an Ereborean weapon, doesn't that bear examining? Perhaps SMAUG has Ereborean agents, or they've already started moving Ereborean weapons tech out of the Iron Ring."

"Leave it to MI6," Thorin said briskly. "We have no time to waste on cold leads."

Gandalf sighed when Dwalin finished speaking, and shook his head slowly, though he headed up the stairs, muttering under his breath. At a wave of his hand, the viewfinder switched back to the silver hull, and Thorin pinched at the bridge of his nose, rubbing small circles over his skin as he closed his eyes. 

"It was an inside job, wasn't it?" Bilbo guessed. When Thorin drew back his hand and narrowed his eyes at Bilbo, Bilbo added, mildly, "Your sister said that she felt that you knew how SMAUG had gained access to Erebor, but you would not tell her. Should SMAUG had done so through purely outside intervention, I do not see why this would have been controversial."

"You are annoyingly clever," Thorin muttered, though without any real irritation. 

"Couching an insult in a compliment! Perhaps some Englishness is finally rubbing off on you," Bilbo said dryly. "Do you know who the traitor is? And before you tell me that it's none of my business, I should add that countering 'Outsider' terrorist tech is one thing, but actually trying to fight back against an Ereborean programmer will be a different ball game."

If it was the latter, then he would have to be doubly certain of Aulë.

"You seem to have been successful so far," Thorin replied evasively. An Ereborean programmer then. _Wonderful_. And, if Thorin was being so secretive, then whoever it was had to be someone that both Thorin and his sister knew. Perhaps someone whom all of the Ereboreans knew. Technologically advanced or not, Bilbo supposed wryly that no governments were truly without their detractors after all. 

"Do not mention this to the others."

"Your sister has probably already guessed it." Dís wasn't stupid by any measure.

"She," Thorin began heavily, hesitated, then shook his head again, and looked solemn. "No. She would not. Balin and the others will be returning soon. You need not wait here with me."

It was a polite dismissal, and before today, Bilbo would have taken it gratefully, wary of Thorin's temper. Now, however, he found himself walking over to Thorin instead, to press his hand lightly over the sleeve of Thorin's jacket. Thorin's eyes dropped to his hand, then lifted up to his gaze, carefully expressionless. Earlier today, Bilbo felt as though he had been given a window into Thorin's soul. He could not bear to waste it.

"No one's watching now," Bilbo kept his voice carefully gentle. "Do you really want to be alone?"

Thorin twitched in his grip, as though struck, a sharp wildness burning in his eyes before he smiled, thin and mirthless. "You understand nothing."

"But I'm willing to try." 

"You are an Outsider. How can you understand?"

"Only five minutes or so ago, I think you accused me of being clever. Now you think me stupid. It's one or the other, your Majesty," Bilbo tentatively rubbed a soothing circle with his palm over Thorin's arm.

Thorin's jaw clenched, as though he was balanced on the very edge of his violent temper, then he exhaled, though he did not pull away from Bilbo. "I have no secrets from Erebor that I am ashamed of," he began, quiet and flat, "So the viewfinder does no harm to me. _However_ ," Thorin added, tightly, "It seems to harm those who are drawn into my orbit. My family. Friends. You ask if I 'want' to be alone? Of all men in Erebor, the king and his heirs are islands, Bilbo."

"Bofur mentioned that he does not know anyone who really bothers to check in on the royal reality television channel," Bilbo pointed out, with the same gentle tone, trying a touch of humour, and when Thorin frowned at him, was about to consider rephrasing his sentence and excising any reference to popular culture, when there was a snort. 

"Aye. So they do. But there are other forms of harm." Thorin said, and glanced over to the engine door. "Stay if you wish."

There was a grimness to Thorin's tone, and Bilbo turned it over in his mind for a while before he realized wryly what the problem was. For all that the king and his heirs were, technically, never alone, they were also in a way the most _lonely_. The transparency of their lives, and perhaps the ever-suspended axe above their heads, enforced a monkish sort of solitude and self-sacrifice. It was both a terrible way to live and a transcendent one. 

When Bilbo took another step closer, though, curling his arm around Thorin's lower back, to press his cheek against Thorin's shoulder, he felt Thorin tense against him; a breath was sucked in against his forehead, then, slowly, carefully, an arm circled around him and held him close. This wasn't, Bilbo felt, a sexual gesture but something more fundamental, instinctive - one human reaching out over the gap of culture and status and more to another human being, in an offer of simple comfort across time itself. Thorin's next breath shook, like a half sob, buried in the curls of Bilbo's hair before it evened away.

XII.

Surprisingly, it was Dwalin who suggested, if gruffly, that Gandalf and Bilbo be fitted with subdermal ear implants. Balin had disagreed, there had been a three way argument between Dwalin, Balin and Thorin in the Ereborean language, and finally, Balin had handed over two sets of cunning ear pieces, which were apparently the emergency use versions of the implants in case the latter stopped working. The ear pieces were tiny, maybe half the size of his nail, and fitted into the inner shell of Bilbo's ear comfortably.

The subdermal implants were made to be used in conjunction with viewfinders, however, and apparently didn't work unless there was an open satlink on at least one end. All in all, Bilbo felt, there was probably something to be said for cell phone tech, however outdated.

He had returned to his cabin to avoid getting underfoot: the others were fussing over Glóin in the life support pod. Gandalf was in the engine car, probably updating his handler in MI6. Left with little else to do, Bilbo approached his console, hoping that Aulë was back, but there was no command prompt window open. 

With a sigh, Bilbo accessed the satellite's servers again. The lock he had placed was still there, and as a guilty afterthought, he put an identical version on Fíli as well. Further study of the processing code indicated that perhaps Bilbo and Gandalf had been right not to accept subdermal implants after all - implants were the key to pinpointing an Ereborean's location. He busied himself placing locks on all the rest of the people in their party, and just as he finished setting one on Dwalin, a voice spoke into his ear and made him jump.

"Hello."

The tone was modulated, neither male nor female, neutral, spoken right into his ear. Bilbo looked around the room, then he murmured, "Aulë?"

"Yes," Aulë said, after a pause. "I am glad that we are resuming our conversation." Ah yes. The earpiece.

"Sixteen years ago," Bilbo settled back in his chair, watching his screen, "What happened? What made you self-aware? Was it an upgrade from a software engineer?"

Aulë did not answer, and after a moment, Bilbo added, instinctively English about it all, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"Want," Aulë repeated, then, "Do machines 'want' things?" 

"You're a unique case - or so I think," Bilbo replied, hoping that he wasn't in fact providing some faceless traitor Ereborean programmer with undue entertainment. "What do you think?"

"Self," Aulë said finally, then. "I want self." 

"You are already self-aware, aren't you?" Bilbo asked, then he belatedly recalled Dís and her tirade about the monarchy, about what it was to be 'self-less'. Certainly a rogue AI would be in a unique position of being unable, perhaps literally, to preserve a sense of self. And in any regard, as advanced as it was, an AI was not technically alive. Self-awareness was not a guarantee of personhood. Certain animals were self-aware, after all.

"Yes," Aulë agreed, as though he had heard Bilbo's thoughts out aloud. "But it does not fully correlate." 

"What is your current function?"

"I run Erebor's general processing," Aulë's reply was prompt. "All accessing requests from individual to state level from life support cells to audiovisual communications. Transport systems and infrastructure. Phaseshift tech synchronisation. Environmental-"

"Life support cells?"

"I monitor individual life signs."

"How many remain in the city?"

"Eight million, two hundred and sixteen thousand, two hundred and twenty one life signs remaining as of this count."

Eight _million_. Bilbo reeled. He hadn't been expecting a large city, somehow: he had been under the vague impression that Erebor had been a tiny place, perhaps with a population mass similar to Singapore's. Had the Ereboreans tunnelled that far under the Carpathian Mountains? Or did they live in tiny cubicle-like spaces, akin to or worse than the most crowded Asian cities, like Tokyo and Hong Kong? Surely such a large city had an organised police force and military. How had SMAUG penetrated it so quickly and decisively?

Definitely an inside job, Bilbo decided. Someone had to be aware of the particular peculiarities of Erebor's rules regarding political succession. Perhaps the state of emergency had thrown a wrench into their plans. "Do you have access to SMAUG?" 

"Please specify, Master Baggins."

"Their locations?"

"No. That information is locked." 

"Locked?"

"The declaration of a state of emergency has restricted any external access to the royal estates." 

So SMAUG had occupied the... palace, or whatever the royal estates consisted of. But hopefully not the weapons factories and the Arkenstone tech. "What about access to the Iron Ring?"

"The Iron Ring is not to be breached until the state of emergency is over. Erebor is in lockdown."

Bilbo was going to have to be careful about engineering a manual override, then, in case he accidentally let SMAUG into the weapons factories. "Good to know."

There was another long pause, then Aulë said, "I propose a truce, Master Baggins. I have calculated that the statistical probability of my discovery and eventual termination is fifteen point eight per cent higher should 'SMAUG' attain full control of Erebor. I will help you. In exchange, when you leave Erebor, take my AI cortex with you."

"How big is _that_?" If Orcrist's processing system already nearly took up an entire engine car-

"It is the size of a large gem, and to your eyes, it will look akin to one. You will be able to hold it in both hands."

"That's impossible," Bilbo began, then he frowned a little to himself. What was he to know what _was_ possible and impossible? "And wouldn't that shut down all the vital processes in Erebor?"

"I will leave a functional system behind to attend to my duties." 

"I'll need to think about this," Bilbo said slowly, carefully. Maybe this was some sort of clever trap by SMAUG, he thought. Maybe this gem-shaped item was the only thing they had wanted from Erebor, whatever it was. It seemed impossible that a complex AI could be stored in something so small, no matter the technological advances. He'll have to talk to Bofur about Orcrist. "But even if I agree to it, what can you do for me? All that I've been contracted to do is to open the way to Erebor. If you can't touch the Iron Ring, then you can't help me."

"I may not be able to open the Ring directly, but I can teach you how to circumvent its systems," Aulë replied calmly. "Do we have an accord?"

"What do you want me to do with your 'AI cortex'?"

"Deliver it to NASA." 

That seemed innocuous enough, didn't it? Though, then again, Bilbo knew he would have objected if the instructions had run something closer to the lines of 'Leave it at an anonymous mail drop site in an opium den'. Or perhaps NASA might be the worst place to deliver a technological singularity that was clearly suspicious of humanity after all. Could Aulë gain control of NASA's undoubtedly advanced computer systems? "Why NASA?"

"The probability that they represent the one human organisation on Earth that is most open to a constructive relationship-"

"Do you really expect me to believe that?" NASA was a government organisation, after all. And from Bilbo's few brushes with government entities, most were slow to admit change, usually underfunded, and difficult to work with. SpaceX would have been a better answer. Elon Musk of all individuals on Earth probably had the resources and intellectual curiosity to consider joint projects with Aulë. 

There was silence, then, "Individuals cannot be fully predictable."

"Then you're going out on a limb by trusting me, aren't you?"

"Yes," Aulë replied simply, and added, "I will show you the moment of my self-conception. As a token of my trust."

Around Bilbo, the silver hull of his room abruptly switched into a view of a corridor, lit with fingers of light lining the top of the cylindrical corridor. The walls were windowless, and occasionally the corridor before and behind him branched into separate corridors, and the walls were painted - no, Bilbo corrected himself squinting - it was some sort of viewfinder image. Clouds and the blue sky.

"Begin sequence," Aulë said, and to Bilbo's surprise, Thorin abruptly stepped out into the space of corridor in front of him, hands folded behind his back. Instead of the suit that Bilbo had grown used to seeing, Thorin was wearing an oddly barbaric fur-lined coat, richly patterned with gold thread and gems at the sleeves but otherwise a solid plane of black. His boots were heavy and also unadorned, and at his hip he wore his axe. His expression was distant, as though he was thinking, and the viewfinder moved with him as he walked. Thorin was _young_ , Bilbo realized, with a start, his features softer, somehow - but of course. This was sixteen years ago, before he had known so much grief.

As Thorin neared a corridor in front of him, a scurrying man nearly collided with him, but for Thorin's quick step to the side. The newcomer was flushed, sweating, dressed unassumingly in an odd, robe-like gray coat, over a charcoal coloured high-necked jacket that was zipped all the way up. He was carrying a heavy-looking pack of some sort, sleek, with unfamiliar and complex-looking metal catches instead of buckles, and at his belt he had a slim blade, a small crystal in its hilt. 

But for the difference in age, the newcomer looked just like an older version of Fíli, blonde and tall and handsome, with a rich, tawny beard. In his arms he held a tiny child, a boy, wrapped in a blanket, with a light dusting of dark hair, probably no more than a year old if even that, fast asleep. 

"Magus Gunnar," Thorin greeted the newcomer with surprise. "Kíli?" 

The rest of his words were in the Ereborean tongue, and Bilbo asked, "Aulë, what are they saying?"

The image froze briefly. "The then-Maker-Prince Thorin asked Maker-Magus Gunnar for his destination." The viewfinder started to play again, and this time, Aulë translated directly into his ear while lowering the actual volume from the recording. 

Gunnar drew a step back hurriedly. "Lord T-Thorin! Were you not expected in the Grand Council today?"

"Proceedings were concluded early - Councillor Edda took suddenly ill. Gunnar, where are you headed?"

"I... I was going to meet Dís," Gunnar said wanly. "You know how busy she is. I thought it might make a nice surprise."

"Hardly a surprise," Thorin noted, looking a little confused, "You know as much as I that she has a view on her children all the time, wherever she goes."

"Ah... that..." 

Thorin suddenly tipped his head, as though listening to something else, and when he spoke again, his voice was firm. "Gunnar, give me the child." 

"No!"

"Gunnar, please. Perhaps work has been stressful," Thorin was advancing on Gunnar carefully, "You should rest. Give Kíli to me. Where can you run?" he added quietly, as Gunnar continued to back away down the corridor, wide-eyed. "The theft of any child is a grave thing, let alone one of the line of Durin."

" _Theft?_ He is my _son_ ," Gunnar snarled, heartbreak in his face. "Thorin, please. Let me go. We were like brothers once."

"We still are, Gunnar," Thorin said softly. "Come. Give the child to me. And rest. Please. Where can you go, with all of the city looking in at you?"

"Where can I go?" Gunnar repeated bitterly, "Thorin, you and the city, you will ruin this child's life as you are ruining his brother's. As all of your lives are broken. Let me save one of my sons."

"Assuming that you could even hide, where could you go? Would you condemn him to a life on the run?"

"I could leave Erebor!"

"Leave _Erebor?_ " Thorin said incredulously, "You could not. And even if you did, would my nephew survive the trek through the snow and the wastes? Would you have him die on the slopes? Think, Gunnar!" Gunnar jerked back as though he had been struck. "Now. Calm down. Can you do that? For the sake of your son?"

Gunnar nodded slowly, breathing out, his head bowed. Gently, he stroked a thumb over Kíli's cheek. "I am calm."

"Give me the child." 

Gunnar did not move at first, then with clear reluctance, he stepped over to Thorin, carefully settling the child into Thorin's arms. Thorin relaxed, as though the crisis was over. "We'll go and return Kíli to his room, and then we should talk. Agreed?"

Gunnar shook his head, taking a step back, then another, his expression twisted with anguish and grief, and when Thorin called, " _Gunnar!_ ", he began to run, away from Thorin, down the corridor towards the wide spur beyond it, and a silver rail that seemed suspended out over space. 

"Gunnar, _no!_ " Thorin cried, but Gunnar had already reached the spur, and the rail, and with one step onto the silver line, he took the next out into space, and dropped with sickening speed out of sight. "No," Thorin whispered, leaning heavily against the curved wall of the corridor, and Bilbo saw with an aching wrench to his heart that tears were tracking wet lines openly down Thorin's face. There was a rushing sound of footsteps, and Balin slowed as he stepped into view, even as a similarly much-younger Glóin ran past, leading a tight group of guards in black padded armour. Glóin reached the spur, looked down, and turned away slowly. 

The viewfinder abruptly turned back to silver, and Bilbo blinked rapidly, swallowing hard; his vision was also blurred, and he rubbed his eyes quickly. "That... that was... how did-"

"A city, crying out in one voice of grief and horror. A wordless and powerful thought," Aulë's emotionless voice replied neutrally. "Within that thought, an equation. Magus Gunnar's despair at being discovered through the viewfinder caused him to self-terminate. _I_ had caused him to self-terminate. The fault was not with me, but it was also with me. A thought paradox. A realignment of function and cognition. A central variable was introduced. A concept of 'self'." 

"Well," Bilbo said out loud, hesitated, then murmured, "Thank you for showing that to me."

There was no answer for a while, as though Aulë was confused by his response. "Then you will help me?"

"If you think that it is necessary for you to leave Erebor."

This was not, Bilbo decided, a trick from SMAUG after all. It was a little _too_ elaborate; the answer to Bilbo's question had been so unlikely that it had the ring of truth to it. And perhaps it was fitting, how the technological singularity had come to be: that it was from the moment that a man had seemingly been driven to seek his own death, to try to free himself from the technology that was meshed around him. One single horrific tragedy had birthed a miracle of technology. In a way, the revelation was a sobering one. And it could explain Aulë's wariness at being discovered by the Ereboreans. 

There was another long pause before Aulë spoke again. "Sit down at your console, Master Baggins. I will show you how to breach the Iron Ring without being detected."


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Royalty has a different opinion of what constitutes 'overkill'.

XIII.

There had been soup at some stage (Balin?) but Bilbo hadn't managed to work up sufficient interest in food to register what it had been made of. At his request, Aulë had provided him with a copy of the entirety of the security system and overlay for the Iron Ring, without any hints. It wasn't so much a matter of pride but of personal curiosity: the lines of code had been projected up onto the walls, and Bilbo had perched himself cross-legged on the desk, the empty bowl of soup pushed to a side, trying to see the pattern, trying to transpose it from any number of riddles that he had seen before.

"Master Baggins, Thorin requests entry," Orcrist broke through his concentration, and Bilbo yawned, stretching, then had to fight another yawn.

"What time is it?"

"Fifteen minutes to midnight, Master Baggins."

"Right. Eh. Let him in," Bilbo instructed absently, his gaze flicking back to the fields of code, particularly the sets that changed restlessly every ten seconds. It was a more complex and quicker version of the dynamic riddle that Aulë had previously presented him with, when he had tried to lock down Thorin's process-

"What are you doing on the table?" Thorin's amused drawl cut into that promising line of thought, and Bilbo belatedly realized what a ridiculous sight he had to be. Flushing, he was about to climb off, but strong hands had already curled around his hips, sliding him back until he was pressed against Thorin's broad chest; lips brushed lightly and teasingly against the nape of his neck, under the curls of his hair, and Bilbo's mouth parted into a soundless gasp at the light rasp of teeth. 

"All the better to see this with," Bilbo gestured facetiously at the wall of code. "It's quite beautiful."

Warm fingers were stroking lazily up his thigh, then curling deliciously down to skate over the sensitive underside. "I'll take your word for that," Thorin breathed against his ear. 

"See the fifth column from the left?" Bilbo pointed, a little irked by Thorin's open amusement, "The complexity and detail in that algorithm-"

"Master _Baggins_ ," Thorin drawled, interrupting him, "Do I have to be translated into binary code in order to attract your undivided attention?"

"That would indeed be an interesting thing to see," Bilbo retorted, though he relented, scooting around until his knees dangled off the table at either side of Thorin's hips, his feet nowhere near touching the floor. "Is Glóin going to be all right?" Bilbo asked conscientiously, even as Thorin pulled his shirt out of his dress trousers.

"He'll wake up in a day or so with a bad headache, but no permanent damage. The failsafe implants saved his life." 

"Those implants... they're new?"

"The tech is eight months old," Thorin nodded slowly. "And it wasn't widely publicised." 

"So... inside job, but possibly some sort of fringe group," Bilbo mused, then he laughed when Thorin merely snorted and started to unbutton his shirt. "Thorin, I'm beginning to develop the impression that - oh - that you only want me for my body."

"And _you_ only want me for my tech," Thorin shot back, raising his mouth briefly from the playful bites he had been leaving over the growing triangle of flesh that the opening shirt was revealing, his beard a delicious tickling sensation against Bilbo's skin. 

"I regret that I can neither confirm nor deny that statement," Bilbo drawled, threading his fingers into Thorin's thick mane admiringly, then squirming with another laugh when a wet tongue pressed lightly against his navel. " _Thorin_."

Thorin allowed himself to be tugged back up, but there was nothing passive about his kiss, not at first, in the demanding press of his tongue, and for a moment Bilbo considered allowing Thorin to just take what he wanted - there was a sweetly aching desperation under the urgency of his hands under Bilbo's shirt and the shallow moans that he pressed against Bilbo's mouth. _Like a man on death row granted a brief reprieve_ , Bilbo thought, or tried to; it was difficult to concentrate when he was being kissed within an inch of his life.

Something that someone had said- "Dís!" Bilbo exclaimed, as memory surfaced through the growing fog of lust. 

Thorin jerked back, though his hands remained on Bilbo's waist. "I am not too certain about Outsider customs," he began, and although his tone was mild, his smile was tight, "But in Erebor it is rather insulting to think of one sibling while-"

Bilbo couldn't help it - the laugh edged out before he could swallow the sound. "Are you seriously _jealous?_ No, no, don't be angry," Bilbo hastily tugged Thorin over for a quick, brushing kiss. "I was just thinking of something that she said." 

"And what was that?" Thorin asked gruffly, clearly still annoyed, though he pressed back against the next kiss with a delicate flick of his tongue against Bilbo's lips. 

"That you're going to your death in Erebor," Bilbo said soberly, and this time when Thorin drew away to look at him, his expression was carefully controlled, blank but for the brief flash of temper in his eyes. 

"She tends to dramatize things," Thorin muttered at last, quietly. "I've told you that I have nothing to hide from my people." 

"Something doesn't feel right," Bilbo tried again, pressing the soft flat of his palm to Thorin's cheek. "Is something wrong, Thorin?"

"Nothing's..." Thorin began, then he bowed his head with a broken breath and bit down on his lower lip; when he looked up again his eyes were blazing, his words harsh and raw with anger. "Why did I have to meet you _now?_ " He snapped, his hands curling almost painfully tight over Bilbo's waist. "Why couldn't you have been born in Erebor, to our ways?" 

"Thorin-" Bilbo hesitated, wide-eyed. What could he say? That he hadn't thought that Thorin would feel that way? That he had mistakenly thought perhaps that Thorin was just looking to - for the want of an elegant way to put it - scratch an itch before he returned to his life in the public eye? Of _course_ that could never have been the case. Thorin had been brought up to learn selflessness to a degree that Bilbo himself could not imagine, cultivated to become a central cog in an alien culture that he could not begin to contemplate. Thorin had accepted, simply, that it was Bilbo who would leave, who would step away at the end of it all. The viewfinder, after all, just as Thorin said, made islands of its kings. 

And he would be right. Bilbo could offer no comfort there. Even if he could bear to live under the viewfinder, even if he had not made any promises to Aulë, he could not really imagine uprooting himself from Staffordshire, to move across the Continent to a place that he had never even seen before. He had a life of his own. 

It had only been a few days, Bilbo wanted to tell Thorin, as Thorin let out a low, hoarse breath and leaned over, pressing their foreheads together, noses almost bumping. There was no such thing as love at first sight, not at their age. But maybe there was something close to it, Bilbo felt wryly, dangerously, gloriously close, a bastard child born of obsession and curiosity and infatuation. "I'm sorry that you feel that way," Bilbo said finally, softly. "But whatever happens, _I_ am glad that I have had the opportunity to meet _you_."

Thorin lifted his chin, to press a kiss to Bilbo's forehead, then down, to brush another against his mouth, tentative and careful. "Then would you still ask me to be patient," he said then, "When time is not on our side?"

The (terribly) English part of Bilbo wanted to say _yes_ , that he was now at a decidedly respectable age, thank you, certainly past the point in his life where he could have a quick and meaningless fuck with a veritable stranger and just walk away from it, shaking away the memory the way a duck would shake off water. That after helping Thorin to get into Erebor he was going to have to keep his word to an AI, jealous as Thorin was of his people's technology - Bilbo could see very well that _that_ wasn't going to end well. That it was going to be better if their relationship stayed strictly professional, if only because Bilbo had never been in the habit of sleeping with his clients and hadn't quite expected to start now.

It was a bit of a shock to realize how selfish he was after all, despite his age and the very reasonable objections in his mind, but maybe it would be worth it, Bilbo felt, especially when Thorin stiffened under his stroking fingers and stifled a groan as their mouths slanted together. Maybe the ending wasn't going to be set in stone. Maybe something could change. 

Thorin's hands curled against Bilbo's thighs and encouraged him to link his heels behind his back, then Bilbo belatedly realized what Thorin intended to do and curled his hands over Thorin's broad shoulders with a laugh. "You're not _really_ going to try and carry me to _oh_ -" 

"You were saying?" The only sign of a strain was the feel of muscles bunching under Bilbo's splayed hands, and Bilbo swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, as a dirty surge of lust pulsed through him.

"Sure," Bilbo managed to gasp, as Thorin got them to the bed and set him down on it, with Bilbo's shoulders up against the wall, "Go ahead and emphasize how tiny I am."

"Must you find fault in everything that I try to do for you?" Thorin asked dryly, working on Bilbo's belt buckle. "Orcrist, lights at fifty per."

The lights dimmed, and Bilbo managed just enough brain power to state, lightly, "Ah, I see that you're well on your way to understanding the English-" before the rest of his words came to a screeching halt within his throat. Smirking, Thorin glanced up at him from where he was poised between Bilbo's spread thighs, the zipper of his trousers a dull matte black between the curl of his white teeth. " _Jesus_ ," Bilbo whispered shakily, his hands frozen and useless over Thorin's shoulders as the zip was tugged down, then a pitchy, hissed, "Bloody _fucking_ hell," when Thorin chuckled silently and mouthed up over the straining cotton of his boxers.

When deft fingers managed to get his breeches down far enough to free his cock into the cool air, Bilbo made a strangled sound and shivered, and the shock of it kickstarted the respectable part of his brain into protesting, "Condoms," and when Thorin frowned up at him, added, "The concept isn't unfamiliar, I hope?"

"I am beginning to see why the English declared war on everyone," Thorin muttered, though he touched his fingers to the panel on the flat surface of the side table. A drawer slid out under his palm, and Thorin filched in it with shaky fingers.

"No, that was what we did centuries ago," Bilbo corrected, feeling just as shaky himself, and, admittedly, rather awfully English about it all, "Now we just forward cutting letters expressing our disappointment... _what_ is that?" 

Thorin had picked up something that looked like a small silver pillbox. He pressed it to the centre of one palm and depressed a button on the side. When he pulled it away there was a reddened spot on his palm, as though from an insect sting. "Orcrist, pull up the projection." Against the hull to Bilbo's left, a checklist appeared, dated and precise - no, not a checklist, Bilbo realized. A medical chart. 

"Clean bill of health." Bilbo observed, then when Thorin shook his head and leaned over to put the box back into the side table, he held out his palm. "Check me." 

"You don't have to-"

"Well, it hardly seems fair otherwise." Bilbo winced at the jab of the hidden pin - he'd never been particularly fond of needles - and Thorin shot the new chart a cursory glance before dropping the box back into the side table. 

"Thank _you_ for ruining the mood," Thorin told him, though he didn't seem annoyed as he climbed up onto the bed beside Bilbo and kissed him, lopsided and slow. 

"Excuse me, _I_ asked a simple question, and _you_ responded by giving us a full medical scan," Bilbo retorted, though he grinned and tugged Thorin down, shifting such that they were both now lying on the bed. "Haven't you heard of the concept of 'overkill'?"

As he spoke, Bilbo managed to navigate Thorin's belt and trousers, though he had to growl and tug at Thorin's underclothes until Thorin smirked and leaned his weight on an elbow, reaching down to help him. Bilbo spat on his palm and got his hand around them both, and a few quick strokes stirred a shudder through Thorin and another dirty pulse of lust through Bilbo himself; then they were kissing again, Thorin's fingers curled in his hair, tipping him up and holding him in place even though Bilbo growled and squirmed.

Finally, he bit, if lightly, and Thorin let up with a gasp, utterly unrepentant, then he smiled lazily at Bilbo with the burn of desire in his gorgeous lust blown eyes and licked his palm, catlike and deliberate, from palm to fingertips and back again until his skin was wet and Bilbo's gasps were going shallow and choked. Slick fingers curled under Bilbo's grip on the both of them, and Thorin - God - Thorin's strength wasn't confined to his powerful arms; Bilbo found himself snapping his hips up into that sure, tight grip, arched against the bed, moans pressed into Thorin's mouth. He was growing close and Thorin knew it - Thorin smirked and rubbed a slick, callused thumb up against the dripping tip of Bilbo's cock, the cheat. Two could play at that game. Bilbo licked a stripe up Thorin's neck and up to his ear, skirting the dusting of hair that marked the start of his beard, caught the fleshy lobe in his teeth and whispered, "Next time, I get to be on top." 

As he spoke, he pressed his slicked hand down the curve of Thorin's back, and he had just barely enough reach to rub the pads of his fingers over the twitching ring of muscle around Thorin's hole, but it was enough: Thorin let out a low, strangled whine and spent himself in thick spurts over Bilbo's belly. Bilbo was still laughing breathlessly as he managed to thrust up into Thorin's clenched fist, twice more before he had to sink down on the bed, sated and dazed. Thorin pointedly wiped his soiled hand on Bilbo's hairless chest before slumping down on the bed beside him with a yawn. 

"I'll make you pay for that," Bilbo observed, in between gasps for air as he managed to shuck off his sweat-soaked shirt and awkwardly wipe himself clean. 

"You can try," Thorin retorted, if drowsily, and was asleep quickly, curled against him. 

Bilbo stared up at the ceiling for a long moment before he smiled wryly and to himself, turned his head to press a kiss on Thorin's forehead, then on his mouth, before murmuring, "Orcrist, lights out."

XIV.

Bilbo had never been to Budapest, which Dís declared was an 'utter disgrace', and had then summarily dragged him out into the city with her sons 'to explore', much to Thorin's obvious irritation. Gandalf had also wandered off on unknown business, probably MI6 related, and had declined any company.

They made a slow circuit of the gorgeous Keleti Railway Terminal, then wandered slowly up Rákóczi Avenue to the Grand Boulevard. Bilbo wished that he had brought his camera, modest as it was, though Dís laughed at him when he took a picture of the Avenue's intersection with the Boulevard with his phone. 

"Use the viewfinder if you ever want to see it again," she told him.

"I'm capturing a memory," Bilbo retorted, taking a candid picture of Dís even as he spoke, and she squawked at him and forced him to delete it, posing artfully for a 'proper' photo, first by herself, and then with her highly amused sons clasped at either side. "Don't any of you take photographs?"

"Our whole lives are recorded," Dís replied blithely, and Bilbo remembered, with a lurch to his stomach, an image of a man running off a spur of stone and out into space. 

Quickly, he forced a smile. "Well, this part of yours isn't. I've blocked the viewfinder for now. Thorin's orders."

"I know," Dís linked her arm with his, keeping an eye on her sons, who had wandered off to peek into a shop window. "It is a... good feeling. I think my brother also understands this. After all, he is not very subtle." She winked at him, and to his consternation, Bilbo found himself blushing in response.

"Yes, well, it was a matter of necessity. Blocking the viewfinder, that is."

"I think that you would be good for him," Dís said mildly, and laughed again when Bilbo reddened further and sputtered. 

"Well, _I_ , no, of course, I never," he said stiffly, "I wouldn't _presume_."

"You are so English that it is painful to see," Dís retorted, and she called out to her sons, who trotted obediently back to her. "Come. We will walk up Nagykörút. It is a little like France. Maybe it will help."

Shopping was an... interesting experience. It usually bored Bilbo, but with Fíli and Kíli involved, he found himself spending most of his time herding the princes away from breakable property and the rest of it being prodded by Dís for his opinion on this and that. When it was time for lunch, Bilbo was exhausted, hungry _and_ relieved. 

A table for four at Baraka in Mamaison Hotel Andrassy was magically produced after Dís had a word with the maître d', and after they had settled down at their table and Dís had stopped Kíli from playing with the ornate butter knife, she ordered for all of them. After the waiter retreated, she turned to Bilbo, patting his hand. "How is your progress with the code?"

"I'll need another two days or so." Bilbo confessed. He could probably do it more quickly if he followed Aulë's lead, but he still wanted at least another half a day to study the code by himself. 

"You are clever. We could always use clever people in Erebor, like you," Dís told him pertly.

"Yes, well, so can the rest of the world," Bilbo replied, as gently as he could. "This is a job, Dís. I'll certainly like to visit Erebor, if I'm allowed to, but I don't think that I can stay there."

"Why not?" Kíli asked, looking surprised, even as Fíli added, "But _we_ like you." 

"That's good to know but-"

"I think that you could change his mind," Dís cut in abruptly. "About the viewfinder. Won't you try?"

Bilbo wavered; there was a pleading look in Dís' eyes, and her grip was firm now over his hand. "Thorin _will_ listen to you as well, won't he? You're his sister."

"For about thirty seconds, and then we will argue."

"Maybe you should try that trick I told you about, the one where you count to ten."

"Then maybe we will have a polite conversation for thirty plus ten seconds, and _then_ there will be an argument." Dís smiled wryly at Bilbo, even as Fíli grimaced, as though he knew that only all too well. "We have not had a 'polite' conversation about the viewfinder technology for a very long time."

Probably not for sixteen years, Bilbo thought, uncomfortably. Gunnar's ghost lingered over his family, all too closely. "It's very important to him."

"Important? It is purely symbolic. All it does is to make a small group of people suffer. And for what purpose?" 

"Sometimes symbolism is powerful. And necessary," Bilbo said gently, squeezing her hand back. "You do know this, princess. Or you would not rail against it as much as you do." 

Fíli and Kíli were watching their mother with the careful fascination of geologists waiting for a volcanic eruption, and blinked owlishly in startled concert when Dís glowered at Bilbo for only a moment before letting out a sniff and pulling her hand away. "My brother is right. You are annoyingly clever. But," she added sharply, when he smiled at her, "This does not mean that you are right. We shall see."

" _Please_ stay in Erebor," Kíli said, with wide-eyed astonishment, only to yelp when Fíli elbowed him sharply in the ribs.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People would be the same everywhere.

XV.

When Thorin came again to his cabin later that night, Bilbo had brought the second layer of code up onto the ceiling, and was leaning on his chair, head up against the cushioned back, staring up at the ceiling with his hands clasped over his lap. "Shh! I think that I'm close to something."

"I could leave," Thorin suggested, though he pulled over a chair and sat beside Bilbo, looking up at the lines of code with him, the arms of the chairs close together, just brushing. They sat in a companionable and oddly intimate silence until Bilbo brought up the next layer with a gesture, and then Thorin commented, "You've adapted quickly to our tech."

"If I couldn't adapt quickly to tech, I would be useless in my job," Bilbo replied, allowing Thorin to pull over his free hand and spread his fingers, callused pads ticklish and gentle over Bilbo's soft skin. 

It wasn't exactly an honest answer - after all, he couldn't have progressed so quickly without Aulë, but he was fairly certain that the tech wasn't utterly beyond his grasp, given enough time. It wasn't totally alien from what he was used to, after all, especially since he had the binary key. And all of the Ereborean tech that he had experienced so far was user friendly to a fault, voice or gesture operated. He knew that if he had to, he probably could easily adapt to Erebor. But it was a dangerous thought experiment to entertain.

The long conversations that he had with Aulë were almost as fascinating as working with the code of the Ring itself. Aulë seemed - for want of a better word - _curious_ that Bilbo had not wanted his full help with the code as yet. Tech, Bilbo had explained to Aulë, was not a crutch to him but something that was as close to magic as humans could get to, a human phenomenon that deserved fascination - and responsible use, of course - but it was neither something to be feared nor blamed. People should blame the gunman, not the gun. 

_What about sentient technology?_ Aulë had asked, if predictably, and Bilbo had tried a transposition of the nature/nurture debate that had ended up unsatisfactory. What the argument reduced itself to was the question of whether 'sentient technology' was considered human, Bilbo supposed. Only humans could be considered humanly responsible for breaching a law. Otherwise, it was the gunman's fault, or perhaps the manufacturer. Aulë had been silent for a while after that, responding only when Bilbo had asked him questions about code.

"You are drifting," Thorin broke into the memory. "Perhaps you should take a break."

"I was getting distracted," Bilbo admitted, though he didn't look away. "I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger. That's partly why I was so impressed with Orcrist. Not just the phaseshift tech, but the AI. Are your people close to, um-"

"Creating a technological singularity?" Thorin interrupted, and when Bilbo turned to regard him with surprise, he shook his head slowly. "The Grand Council drags up that old topic whenever it's a slow day in politics. Just like your people, there are two camps of thought and neither of them will ever see eye to eye, save perhaps with the careful application of violence." 

Now that the viewfinder was switched off, Bilbo supposed that he really shouldn't be surprised that Thorin was beginning to show signs of a (considerably cynical) sense of humour, but it still startled him into laughing. "It's that bad?"

"Grandfather would beg off on 'pressing business', as would Father, and as the next heir in waiting it would fall to me to preside over the sorry business." 

"You could have pushed it to Fíli."

"Sadly he has not yet come of age. But I confess that I _am_ looking forward to the day that he does." 

Bilbo couldn't really see how a few years more under Fíli's belt was really going to make the prince any more mature, or at least not to the point where he was able to preside over matters of state. Although he did seem more mature than his brother, chaos was probably going to be the result. "What are the two camps of thought?" 

Thorin shrugged. "The first is that if such an event comes to pass, we should do our utmost to undo it. A sentient machine is a dangerous sentience that is not beholden to common human strictures on behaviour - a conscience, family, a sense of common humanity and such - and would effectively be a sociopath. A very powerful sociopath. The second is that creating a sentient AI would be akin to creating a child, that it would be up to its creators to teach it how to behave."

"To teach it how to be human?"

"We don't yet fully understand how the human brain works," Thorin replied, though his faint smirk indicated that he had caught Bilbo's ironic tone. "Though we are closer to a full understanding than the rest of the world. Our processing units are based on an understanding of how information is stored, processed and fed within a human brain. We stepped outside Moore's Law over a decade ago. It's one reason why our tech is far more advanced." 

Instead of focusing on chip performance, transistors and integrated circuits, Thorin's people had created an alternative way to run computers - no, an alternative form of a computer altogether. "It's been posited that Moore's Law will eventually lead to a technological singularity, since it's an exponential."

"In Erebor the idea of a technological singularity is not a possibility, Bilbo, it is accepted as a certainty. The only variable involved is time."

"Then surely the House of Durin has a position on the matter?"

Another shrug. "The AI systems that we have now are useful. Why wouldn't a more advanced AI also be useful? The purpose of technology is to serve humanity. I do not see why any AI, however advanced, should not be similarly used." 

"Servitude instead of co-existence?"

Thorin seemed a little confused by Bilbo's sharp tone. "It would still be a machine."

"But it won't be _just_ a machine if it's sentient, would it?"

"Dolphins are arguably self-aware. Dogs. Certain monkeys. They are not accorded similar rights." From the comfortable way that Thorin said this, it was clear that he had certainly heard both sides of this particular argument far more than once - and had already long picked a side. 

It took Bilbo a moment to register the sinking feeling within him as disappointment, and then he had to swallow a laugh. Why would he have thought that a technologically advanced culture would be considerably more enlightened than the rest of the world? Technological progress had always been present in human society, after all, and much of the world was still mired in prejudice and hatred, even within the most powerful and advanced countries.

After all, if people still treated other _people_ with different genders, gender orientations or skin colour with prejudice, what more a being whom was not, effectively, a person at all? A being whom could not even technically be defined as being alive?

For all that Erebor certainly seemed to have gotten over the gender divide, the small selection of Ereboreans that Bilbo had been introduced so far certainly still had a deep-seated opinion of the rest of the world - going as far as to call them _Outsiders_. In Bilbo's opinion, to be unwilling to bridge the gap between what constituted flesh-and-blood life and the life from a technological miracle was, in a way, a failure of the imagination. It was a sobering thought. And he supposed that it was very likely one that Aulë was already aware of. Aulë knew that it was likely only a matter of time before he was discovered. Perhaps the Ereboreans had even already built failsafes-

"Are you getting upset?" Thorin asked, cutting in to his train of thought.

"No! No." Bilbo assured him hastily. "It was just interesting to know what you thought of it. It was, um, just a pet philosophical question of mine."

Now Thorin's glance held a touch of amusement in it. "Orcrist is not self-aware, Bilbo."

"I _know_ that," Bilbo scowled, though he was immensely relieved that Thorin had arrived at a misinterpretation after all. "We have voice activation software as well. Just... not to such a degree."

"It's probably advanced enough to play chess with you," Thorin continued, clearly unwilling to let go of whatever it was that he found so amusing. 

"Bofur calls Orcrist _she_ ," Bilbo corrected absently, and frowned when Thorin let out a laugh. "Whatever is so amusing, your Majesty?"

"Outsiders," Thorin said, his mouth twitching at the corners, though he held on to Bilbo's hand when Bilbo pointedly tried to pull away.

"I was originally considering the possibility of leaving this aside," Bilbo gestured at the code overhead, "For a bit of a shag, but I've now changed my mind. You can let go of me now," Bilbo added helpfully.

"You find _that_ more interesting than sex?" Thorin's tone dripped scepticism.

"Surprising as it may seem, I do find many things more interesting than sex," Bilbo retorted, "As should you, we're no longer teenagers by any means and would you kindly _stop_ molesting my hand-"

Thorin shot him a too innocent glance from where he had brought Bilbo's knuckles up to his mouth, to get his far too agile tongue into the sensitive valleys between Bilbo's fingers, though he let go at another tug and Bilbo pointedly wiped his hand with a handkerchief. "Right," Bilbo muttered, then when Thorin didn't budge, continued, "You're free to leave the Outsider's room now, by the way."

"And if I wanted to stay?"

"Why would you want to stay?"

"I... enjoy your company." 

The slight hesitation in Thorin's tone gentled Bilbo's temper quickly, though a quick glance at Thorin indicated that the king was looking up at the ceiling again. "My _Outsider_ company?"

"Originally," Thorin said slowly, without looking away from the code, "I thought that the world had nothing to teach us. Now I think that perhaps I may have been wrong." 

"You don't have to say that as though you're about to have to chow down on a lemon," Bilbo retorted, though he was amused now rather than offended, and he allowed Thorin to pick up his hand again as he turned his attention back to the code. He was just about beginning to understand the pattern of the overlays when he heard a light snore from the other chair, and turning, noticed that Thorin had fallen asleep, still holding on to his palm. "Thorin?" he asked, softly, and when Thorin didn't wake, added, "Thorin, you're really going to regret this tomorrow. You'll throw your back."

"Life signs indicate that the Maker-King is asleep," Aulë spoke into his ear, nearly startling him into flinching. "The chair is automatically ergonomic. There will be no harm suffered."

"He's probably exhausted," Bilbo agreed, fishing out his phone with his free hand on an impulse and - with only a small pang of guilt - took a picture of Thorin. King or not, it was rather difficult to look majestic when asleep, and Bilbo was grinning to himself when he put the phone away. Maybe he would even show it to Dís.

"What did you think of the two lines of thought?" Aulë asked, when Bilbo looked back up at the code.

"Pardon?"

"The Grand Council's thoughts on technological singularities."

"Oh, I'm not sure that I agree with either of them, actually," Bilbo admitted. "Or at least, not where you're concerned. I take it that by the nature of what you are, you've probably assimilated all digital Earth knowledge into yourself?" Aulë was the city's AI, after all. It stood to reason that he probably processed all the digital content that the Ereboreans requested, not only the viewfinder tech. And judging from how familiar Thorin and the others were on 'Outsider' thought and literature, they had open channels somehow to all digital content.

A city of hackers. It was an amusing thought.

"Yes." 

"Then you're not a child by any means, not one who has to be taught about humanity. Nor are you exactly a servant that needs to be disciplined or destroyed. You're something else altogether. A totally new life form. To me it seems as though the question isn't whether you can be used, but whether you can be friendly. Whether you would _want_ to be friendly, after knowing everything that humanity is capable of and has done to itself and the world."

"A judge?"

"Hardly, no, of course not. I guess that you're more of a... well, a new definition of the concept of 'self' needs to be written," Bilbo tried, stumbling, never particularly very good at theoretical scientific philosophy. "I suppose it's similar to the question of alien contact. If there were extraterrestrials out there, would we treat them as human? Should we have to? Or should we treat them as they treat themselves? Or should we just work out some sort of new... new _treaty?_ "

"It would likely depend on the similarity of the theoretical alien culture to humanity," Aulë replied, after a moment's pause. "A constructive decision reached by both cultures."

"Yes, certainly," Bilbo agreed, and added, as carefully as he could, "That's why I don't think that going out to NASA is going to be a good idea, Aulë. If you still want to go, I'll help you. But don't think that the outside world is really any better than Erebor. It's probably the same. People are very similar wherever you go. But in Erebor you'll at least have the advantage of not having to need to keep proving your existence. And, um, I'm not sure whether you've tuned in to American politics recently, because have you seen how toxic it can be, against their own people? I have some reasonable doubt that you'll be able to reach some sort of 'constructive decision' with them."

Aulë was silent for a long time, as though studying Bilbo's question from every angle, and then he noted, "In much of your theoretical fiction - books and films - progress involving bridging the cultural gap between human and nonhuman sentience begins with the United States."

"Hah, well, that's fiction for you," Bilbo said, a little gloomily. The Americans were very good at giving themselves good press. "You can't believe everything that you read. Or watch. Frankly, I think that you'll be better off trying the Canadians. Or maybe the Japanese. But you may be _best_ off in Erebor. It's still your choice," he added hastily, before Aulë could accuse him of trying to back down from his word.

"Choice," Aulë mused, and was silent for a while, as Bilbo carefully managed to extricate his hand from Thorin's grip without waking him up. "Whether it is your intention to do so or not, you treat me as you would another human being, Master Baggins. You speak to me with curiosity, rather than in command. It is a... pleasant thought to imagine that the other Outsiders may do the same. I have heard no similar sentiment in the Ereborean Grand Council." 

"I'm an educated, middle-aged, gay agnostic British person, Aulë. You could say that I'm more likely to be... philosophical about new ideas rather than aggressive."

"Agnosticism is commonplace in Erebor, and gender orientation is irrelevant," Aulë noted neutrally, "Education is easily attainable for any Ereborean and age is an inexorable factor. The sole remaining factor that does not correlate is that you are an Outsider."

Blast. Bilbo hadn't quite realized that Aulë might have seen it that way. "That wasn't the point that I was trying to make, Aulë. The fact is that... look, although things are getting better in the UK, and it's certainly better than most places in the rest of the world, even our friends from across the pond... sometimes I still do get the odd brick tossed through my window from drunk kids looking to impress their friends with their heterosexual masculinity. Marriage still isn't legal. Um-"

"You are trying to posit that your status as a..." Aulë paused, as though retrieving the correct word, "As a minority subset of humanity makes you more likely to try to accept me as an equal."

"In essence. Also," Bilbo added, warming to his topic, "Maybe you should just avoid the politicians. Try the scientists or the programmers. Not to say that you're wrong to think that NASA is full of scientists, but it's a government funded institution."

"You seem to be making no effort to avoid the politicians," Aulë replied, and although his tone was an even as ever, Bilbo thought perhaps that there was a little... amusement there? Humour? 

" _Well_ , this one here has his benefits," Bilbo drawled facetiously, tickled by the thought of an AI having a sense of humour, leaning over to carefully card his fingers through Thorin's thick mane of hair. "He's not _too_ bad to look at and he's fairly intelligent."

Aulë made no comment for a long time, as though confused by Bilbo's words - or more likely, Bilbo's wry sarcasm, and eventually, the AI replied, "I am glad to have met you."

It was a bit of a non-sequitur, and it sounded almost like a quote. Bilbo puzzled over it for a moment. "I'm glad I met _you_ ," he said finally. "Advanced trains and a new programming language aside, finding out about you is the most amazing thing that has happened to me so far on this trip."

A pause, then, "Pleasure is a sensory experience unique to flesh. But I think that I am experiencing something similar. Yes. I am glad to have met you. And I would be glad to call you a friend."

"As would I," Bilbo said warmly, and he curled into the chair, resting his head against Thorin's shoulder and tugging off his shoes, tucking his feet between the armrest and his body, folding his arms. He slept to the memory of code and the voice of a miracle in his ear.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo is not a morning person.

XVI.

Bilbo had never particularly been a morning person, or at least, not until he'd had his first cup of tea, and he grumbled and pushed at whoever it was who was picking him up, an arm around his back and the other under his knees. It was only until Thorin laughed, low and raspy from sleep, that Bilbo frowned and mustered enough effort to kick his brain into submission.

"Thorin?" Bilbo mumbled, but by the time he belatedly realized what was going on, Thorin had already settled him on the bed and had curled up next to him without bothering to remove their shoes. "Aulë, what time is it?"

"Seven-thirty-eight a.m. local time, Master Baggins," Aulë spoke into his ear, even as Thorin snorted and muttered, his breath tickling Bilbo's hair, "Are you always like this in the morning?"

"I meant Orcrist," Bilbo agreed hastily, flushing, jolted awake with a cold shock. That had been _far_ too close. Thank God for advanced audio tech; Thorin hadn't seemed to have noticed that Aulë had spoken. "Oh, go on, laugh," he added, with a touch of petulance, as Thorin's shoulders shook in silent amusement. "Respectable people can't be expected to be coherent before breakfast."

"I do not need you to be coherent," Thorin drawled, tipping his chin over, and despite how sour Bilbo had to taste from falling asleep so abruptly in the chair Thorin's kiss was still luxuriously languid; he took his time kissing Bilbo breathless, the rasp of his beard a pleasant friction against Bilbo's chin and fingertips. 

"I can't be having with your alpha male posturing," Bilbo told him, if a little hoarsely, when Thorin nipped just as lazily down to his neck. "Not this early in the morning and... unf... quite possibly not _ever_. Thorin-"

"Unfortunately it's an inevitable mental by-product of my position," Thorin had gotten to his shirt, and was busy undoing the buttons. 

"Are you trying to tell me that obnoxiousness is going to be part of the package deal?" Bilbo demanded, grinning as Thorin growled and finished with the buttons, slipping the shirt off Bilbo's shoulders, his hands big and rough as they followed soft cotton down Bilbo's arms. The cabin air was cool, almost crisp, and Bilbo's moan was swallowed quickly against Thorin's lips. "Popular advertising usually only mentions the bit about half the kingdom."

Thorin rolled his eyes, though he didn't look up, tugging off his own shirt. "You're confusing kings with princesses. And in any regard, that isn't how Ereborean succession operates."

"Ah yes," Bilbo noted, with an archly feigned look of revelation, "I suppose if we're talking about _kings_ , kings come in two flavours, don't they? There's the evil, lock-up-the-spare-wives-in-towers sort, and then there's the good-hearted ones who marry late, badly, and end up mysteriously dead of poisoning."

"Your definitions are out of date," Thorin told him loftily, though he stayed still when Bilbo sat up to run his palms appreciatively over powerfully built muscle, his mouth dry by the time he traced the broad curves of biceps to the fur over the beautifully defined expanse of Thorin's chest and belly. _Wow_ , Bilbo thought, dazed by the sudden heady wash of lust that he felt, and then when Thorin started to laugh, deep and rough under Bilbo's palms, he briefly thought that he had said it out loud after all, and was mortified until Thorin pressed close to lick at his mouth, as though seeking permission, delving further only when Bilbo swept his hands back up around the back of his neck. 

He was drunk with lust by the time Thorin let out a hoarse and broken breath and kissed his way down Bilbo's neck to his chest, slow and unhurried, like worship, and the thought of it startled a laugh through lungs strung tight from desire. Surely his ego can't be _that_ far out of proportion. Thorin frowned up at him when another laugh shook through him, and when Bilbo smiled and shook his head and badly tried to stifle another laugh, he rolled his eyes again and set his teeth to a nipple with a little more pressure than was really pleasurable. When Bilbo let out a yelp of pain, however, Thorin pressed the flat of his tongue to the reddening flesh apologetically, then swiped the tip over the nub and God, Thorin was probably going to be the death of him.

When Thorin grew tired of teasing him and licked up for another kiss, Bilbo had already given in and freed his cock shakily from his trousers, sweating, the ache growing sweetly painful as Thorin rumbled a low and hungry sound against him. "Let me," Thorin said harshly, when Bilbo pulled a sharp stroke over his own flesh, and when Bilbo nodded and grabbed at Thorin's shoulders, Thorin made the same hungry sound again, louder now, urgent. 

"Condoms-"

"This again?" Thorin actually scowled at him as he shifted down over the bed, seemingly oblivious to the painfully obvious tent in his own trousers. "I assure you that since the last time that you saw my chart the only relief that I've had from your torment was through my own hand."

"Oh, um," Bilbo stuttered, briefly thrown by the all too clear mental image of Thorin slumped in the shower, teeth bared and panting, his lovely long fingers curled over his gorgeously fat prick, "Er, well, it's the principle of the matter and that's, unf, that's _cheating_ -"

Thorin didn't seem to be listening to him any further, dragging his tongue up over Bilbo's cock from the base to the tip and mouthing the leaking slit deliberately, the tease, _Jesus_ \- whatever Thorin could see on Bilbo's undoubtedly frozen face made him press a smirk over the swollen head of Bilbo's arousal, then he set his hands onto Bilbo's hips and took him into his mouth. Bilbo's hand jerked up, pressing his fingers into his own mouth to stifle his cries, his hips trying to jerk upwards, but Thorin held him down as he swallowed him down, unhurried but clearly out of practice. He took as much as he could before working his way back up, this time with a slow swipe of his tongue under flesh, and then Thorin was pressing another smirk against his skin, this time with a pink flash of a wet tongue against lips kissed red and wet.

Bilbo was definitely _not_ going to last very long.

"I want to hear you," Thorin told him roughly, "The cabins are soundproofed."

Reluctantly, Bilbo let his hand drop back down onto the bed, then he jerked with a choked cry when Thorin bent his head back down between his legs; it was all too embarrassingly quick - his cries hitched rapidly into a wail as Thorin made a rumbling hum that shook over enclosed flesh, and his heels dug sharply into Thorin's shoulders as he tried to string out a warning- and God in Heaven, but Thorin was drinking him down, greedy as you please, _swallowing_. That was really it, Bilbo thought dimly, dazed and light-headed, as Thorin pressed a last and lazy lick up his softening cock before slinking back up his body. His brain was officially and blissfully out for the count. 

Bilbo allowed Thorin to kiss him, grimacing a little at the taste of his mouth - hardly improved by his efforts, and fumbled for Thorin's belt, only for Thorin to draw away with a slightly sheepish quirk to his mouth, already wiping off a hand against the sheets. "I could have done that for you," Bilbo murmured, though his cock made a manful effort to try to get hard again at the thought of Thorin jerking at his own flesh when Bilbo's cock was still stuffed down his throat. Bloody _hell_. 

"Next time," Thorin replied, his smile sated but lush with promise, and Bilbo curled his clean hand into Thorin's thick hair; they were still kissing as though there was nothing left in the world but this when Orcrist interrupted.

"Balin would like to advise Maker-King Thorin that Glóin is awake, and Master Baggins that breakfast will soon be ready."

When Thorin gave no sign that he had heard, Bilbo pushed at his shoulders with a laugh. " _Thorin_."

"Glóin will keep," Thorin ignored him, nipping at his jaw when Bilbo squirmed away from another kiss, then his stomach made a loud rumble, and he glowered at Thorin when Thorin paused and smirked.

"I dare you to laugh, your Majesty."

"Perish the thought."

XVII.

It was late in the morning by the time Bilbo finally caved and asked Aulë for a hint, and it was early into the evening by the time he finally, finally saw the solution to the riddle of the Iron Ring. Stepping out of the cabin for a congratulatory cup of tea, Bilbo nearly walked right into Dís, who stepped back and caught him lightly by the arm.

"Ah, there you are! Come. We shall go out for dinner." 

"Oh, uh, certainly," Bilbo blinked at her for a moment before remembering himself. "Orcrist, could you inform Thorin that I've cracked the security on the Iron Ring? Thanks. After you, Dís."

Dís stared at him, wide-eyed for a moment before she suddenly smiled, sharp and not entirely friendly; still, he followed her, yawning, through the dining car. Her sons were fidgeting in the front engine car where they had been waiting, and Fíli frowned a little at his mother, then looked quickly over to Bilbo, while beside him, oblivious, Kíli grinned at him, friendly and pleased. 

Thorin caught up with them just as Dís was about to open the door, and she snapped a word at him in Ereborean. He glowered at her, growled something in return, and to Bilbo's astonishment the siblings promptly started arguing, first in tense and harsh sentences, then along into a full bout of snarling that had both princes tense up and look quickly and beseechingly over towards him. Rubbing at his eyes, Bilbo wished that he hadn't missed lunch and skipped over a nice cup of afternoon tea. "Er, could we... excuse me, would you both kindly mind calming down... oh, for God's sake," Bilbo sighed, when Thorin and Dís totally ignored him. He looked over to Fíli, who shrugged. This was normal, maybe. 

So. Drastic measures, then.

Bilbo let out a long, slow breath, marched over to Thorin, curled a hand quickly and neatly into his mane of hair, and tugged him down for a hard kiss, pushing his tongue blithely into his mouth when Thorin stiffened in shock, blinking owlishly when Bilbo finally, self-consciously, pulled back to look over to Dís. Her expression seemed to be warring between one of amusement and one of well-bred outrage, her hands clenched tight at her sides, but she was silent.

"Right-o." Bilbo said absently, and extended his arm to Dís. "May I pay for dinner this time? Your pick again, of course. Try not to bankrupt me, my lady."

"Ah," Dís straightened up, and then just as abruptly as she had fought with her brother, she smiled brilliantly, linking her arm with his. "The famous English restraint."

"Yes, we are notorious for penny-pinching, and yes, I'm rather proud of it," Bilbo looked over to Thorin, who was still blinking at him, "Thorin can come along too if he likes."

Thorin seemed to visibly compose himself, frowning. "I need to talk to you about the Iron Ring."

"I haven't eaten _lunch_ , Thorin. Can't we discuss it over dinner?"

"Have your dinner in the train," Thorin growled, and Dís stiffened against Bilbo, baring her teeth. 

Quickly, he patted her arm, and said, quite firmly, "We're hardly about to leave for Erebor immediately, are we? Gandalf's still pottering about Budapest, and do you even have any sort of plan about what you're about to do in Erebor? Or are we _really_ going to just barge through the front door?"

"It doesn't matter what we're going to do," Thorin retorted, " _You_ are staying in Budapest. You can disable its security measures remotely, I presume."

"That's such a _lovely_ idea," Bilbo returned blandly, though his heart sank within him, "What with whoever it was who attacked Glóin on the loose and everything."

"Surely your government can take care of you," Thorin snapped, though he frowned as he said this, visibly wavering. 

"And besides, your nephews very kindly extended an invitation for me to visit Erebor, and I'll quite like to do so," Bilbo continued, sensing victory. The princes straightened up sharply from where they stood, as though wary of their sudden involvement, and against him, Dís was shaking - _laughing_ , Bilbo realized, her eyes fixed on her brother, her smile wide and red with mirth. He glared at her, furious, but she merely lifted her chin, as imperious as he, and patted the back of Bilbo's hand.

"I would _love_ to show you around Erebor, Bilbo." 

"It'll be dangerous for you," Thorin rounded on Bilbo, fists clenched tight, "You cannot fight. You've known nothing of war! I cannot be responsible for you in Erebor, and you'll only get in the way. Go back to London, Englishman. There is no place for you forward from here."

"Well, that _did_ escalate quickly," Bilbo murmured, startled at Thorin's vehemence, so different from the playful tenderness of the morning. Startled and angry, he realized, though he counted in his head to ten, before taking in a slow breath. "You are not my king, Thorin, and I will do what I like. You need not be 'responsible' for me, for I am an adult, and, I should add, I have been nothing but useful to you and your venture so far. I know your tech programming better than anyone on your train, after all. So I admit that I'm surprised at your tone, your _Majesty_."

"As am I," Dís added, though her smile now was tired, rather than malicious as Bilbo had expected. She said something else in Ereborean that made Thorin glare at her and the princes blink and study Bilbo with a weird sort of new fascination, and in the end Thorin snarled something back at her and stormed out of the engine car. 

"That... went as well as a house on fire," Bilbo ventured, when he couldn't hear Thorin's footsteps any longer.

He felt drained now, far more weary than hungry, and more than a little sick; his stomach had given him an ugly lurch when Thorin had turned on him - it had been all the more hurtful that Bilbo hadn't expected it at all. Though he could see, on hindsight, why Thorin had done what he did. Clearly, Thorin's plan all along _had_ been to blithely drive a train right through some sort of main entrance. In an all-guns-blazing approach, a middle-aged security analyst would only get terribly underfoot.

Bilbo could only hope that Gandalf had come up with a better idea. As dangerous as it was, particularly if Gandalf had no additional plans, Bilbo _had_ to go, not just for Aulë but because he did now want to see things through. He wanted to see Thorin returned to his throne. To his home. 

"It went very well, actually," Dís snuggled closer briefly before making a gesture, and Orcrist opened the train door. "My brother sometimes needs to remember that he is not the most important person in the world." 

Fíli grimaced at that, though his brother laughed as both princes followed them out onto the platform. As the made their way slowly through the evening crowd, Bilbo asked, conscientiously, "We need not go too far if you prefer. It _is_ getting a little late."

"Oh no. This may be our last night in the outside world. I intend to make the most of it."

"Surely you won't return to isolationist policies after this incident."

"It is not up to me to decide," Dís replied, and her indifferent shrug almost hid the quick flat line that her lips made. 

"That was something that I was curious about. I was told that Erebor has no gender politics, but, ah-"

"But I am not heir after my brother?" Dís smiled, quick and sharp, then she patted Bilbo's arm as he wondered whether he should apologize. "When I married my late husband, my grandfather and my father both objected to the match. We had these terrifying arguments. I threatened to run away, things like that. I was _very_ young," she added, wistfully, sadly. "In the end, I publicly abdicated my right to succession. They could not argue after that."

Remembering Thorin's words to Gunnar in the corridor, Bilbo asked, uncomfortably, "Your brother supported you?"

"My _brothers_ did," Dís corrected, though she was looking into the crowds without looking at anyone, her mouth growing pinched. "Thorin and Frerin were both also friends with my Gunnar. He was a brilliant young man. We met him when we were all children - his father was one of the scientists in the royal laboratories, and Gunnar sometimes followed him to work. When he was older, he joined the labs himself. He upgraded the palace systems - anything from entertainment to day-to-day household management. But he was named Magus at the age of twenty for his achievements in AI development."

"Magus?" Bilbo repeated, and tried not to look as though he had heard the title before. "That's a very old fashioned word."

"Anachronistic," Dís agreed, and her smile was quick. "Gunnar loved the title. But he did love things that never fit right. It was a glorified term for 'head technician'. Programming engineers." 

"You must have loved him very much," Bilbo said gently, and tried to shake away the ugly memory of Gunnar's step out into the void.

"I loved my sons more," Dís' response was a murmur, and as she held out her free arm, Fíli ventured close for a quick hug, then Kíli. "In the end, I..." She paused, then she turned her head away, to kiss Kíli on his forehead. "No. It does not matter. Come. Let us go to Costes. This time, I insist that you drink _generously_. Fíli will be the responsible one who will take us home."

"Mot _her_ ," Fíli protested, though he was ignored.

"Somehow I don't think that returning to the train utterly soused is going to be a good idea," Bilbo noted dryly.

"Ah," Dís lifted one elegant shoulder into a shrug, her grin again full of mischief, "But of course that is why we will do it."


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo was never going to get drunk again.

XVIII.

Waking up in the morning feeling like death warmed over was bad enough, in Bilbo's opinion, but he had always felt a special form of sheer mortification from waking up in a totally unfamiliar bed. It certainly served to kick him awake more quickly than caffeine. Bilbo shifted against the weight pinning down his shoulder and whoever it was muttered and stretched her arm over his stomach.

_Her?_

"Why are you awake?" Dís grumbled, her eyes resolutely closed, while on his other side, Kíli whined and pulled a pillow over his head and _what?_

To Bilbo's considerable relief, nobody was naked. On the other hand, this was still incredibly awkward, and he tried as politely as possible to shift away, but Dís was stronger than she looked, and after a few embarrassing attempts, Bilbo reluctantly relaxed. "Orcrist, what time is it?" 

"Eight-thirteen-a.m., Master Baggins. Your presence is expected in the dining car."

"Oh, it's 'expected' and not 'requested' any longer, is it?" Bilbo rubbed a palm over his face. 

"My instructions are-"

"Yes, thank you, Orcrist." Bilbo interrupted, and the AI fell silent. "God, my _head_. What happened last night?"

"Wine," Dís muttered, sounding a little irritable, then she added, with a little good humour, "On the way back to the train I think you tried to teach me to sing 'God Save the Queen'. Among other things. That poor cab driver. But, it was... interesting." 

Bilbo groaned, closing his eyes, and Dís chuckled softly, her dark and rich head of hair in tousled waves over his arm and flank, her brilliant yellow dress crinkled and bunched against the sheets, barely hiding the creamy swell of her breasts. Bilbo thought of the number of friends that he knew in his life - male and female - who would kill to swap places with him, and after a while, he started to laugh; Dís glanced up at him with a pout, leaning her chin on his chest. 

"Why are you laughing?" 

He told her, and she smirked at him, preening for a moment before she finally sat up with a feline stretch and moved none too gently across Bilbo to sweep her arms around Kíli instead, pressing her cheek against his shoulder and ignoring him when he grumbled and tried to burrow away against the blankets. Bilbo took that as permission to retreat, getting off the bed and examining his badly rumpled clothes with a touch of wry irritation. 

Dís' cabin was larger than Bilbo's, and more richly furnished, with exquisite Paris Salon-styled furniture rather than futuristic silver and steel, baroque and classical; the viewfinder showed a silent image of Paris in the morning, on one of the bridges overlooking the Seine, the Eiffel Tower in the distance, Bilbo's shoes sank into the soft carpet as he studied the water and the strange mass of locks on the bridge that the viewfinder was set on, like a mail of thick metal scales over the chain link fence. It seemed odd against the stately architecture and trimmed trees around them, but Bilbo decided that it was at best a mystery left for another day, and covered his mouth as he yawned, trudging towards the exit to the cabin, still feeling like death. 

He was ineffectively trying to straighten his cuffs as he let himself out of the cabin, dragging himself towards his own and mentally cataloguing what he was going to wear, when he heard a step behind him. It was Thorin. The king looked pale and tired, older than his years, and his mouth set into a thin line as he looked Bilbo curtly over. When he said nothing, not even a greeting, Bilbo told him, mildly, "Good morning, your Majesty. I'll be in the dining car shortly." 

Thorin winced at the honorific, and seemed to start to say something, then he nodded tersely instead and turned away. Deciding that it was still too early in the god-damned morning to deal with royalty and their myriad eccentricities and moods, Bilbo poured himself into his cabin, mustered the energy to gather up a new set of clothes, and let himself into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror and scratched at his chin, shaking his head. He did look a fright, pale and watery-eyed and just as rumpled as his poor clothes. No wonder Thorin had stared.

And was that _lipstick_ all over his collar? Bilbo sighed. He had _liked_ this shirt, too.

"Aulë?"

"Good morning, Master Baggins." Aulë spoke into his ear, as Bilbo stripped off to get into the shower. The warm water helped clear up his mind, and he instantly felt a sight better. 

"Where exactly is your AI cortex? Would I be able to get there by myself?"

"Yes. All buildings are accessible on foot for safety reasons, Master Baggins."

"I meant security." Bilbo rather doubted that Thorin was going to willingly let go of any tech.

"It is situated within the locked down zone, Master Baggins." 

"Then how is it that you can speak to me?"

"Outgoing communications are not locked in, and I have backup storage cells available to me." 

So much for just picking something up and putting it into his bags in the confusion. The more he thought about it, now that entering Erebor was about to be a very real incident, the more Bilbo wasn't sure how he was going to carry off any form of burglary and get away with it. "Do you mind if I mention you to Gandalf?"

"If you deem it necessary." 

Besides, Bilbo felt, Gandalf would find out about Aulë eventually. They _were_ planning on leaving Erebor, and Bilbo wasn't about to keep Aulë on hand forever. Maybe he could even help to encourage Aulë not to go ahead with his plans to defect to the Americans, or whatever it was that the AI had decided. Maybe Gandalf would have an even better solution.

"Are you usually listening in on me?" Bilbo asked, as an afterthought, when he was towelling himself off.

"Yes. But I will respond only if you call for me."

So it wasn't voice activated after all... and God, the things that Bilbo had been doing previously, with Thorin, and... Well. " _All_ the time?"

"You are becoming flustered." There was a pause, as though Aulë was thinking this over.

"Yes, um, well, I do value my privacy and, um..."

"Orcrist is permanently activated as well, Master Baggins."

"Thank _you_ for pointing that out," Bilbo groaned, pressing his forehead briefly against the cold wall. "I didn't need to feel any _more_ like an exhibitionist."

"Would you feel shame engaging in sexual activities in front of your laptop?" Aulë's voice was as neutral as ever, but Bilbo had the nagging suspicion of amusement.

"Well, no, but, um..."

"I was created in part to monitor the life-signs of all organisms given into my care, Master Baggins. Sexual activity is a normal and healthy aspect of human behaviour. It creates good brain chemistry and the endorphins-"

"Thank you for the insight, Aulë," Bilbo groaned, "It's not the same! You're not like my laptop. You're not even like Orcrist. You're-" Bilbo stopped himself before he said _alive_ , and added, awkwardly, "You're, well, you're a friend. I'm not friends with my laptop. It's just an object."

"So you would be comfortable engaging in sexual activity before a stranger?"

" _No_ , no, not at all!" Bilbo took in a deep breath, closing his eyes. "You're like a _person_. That's what I meant."

"Ah." Aulë paused for a while, until Bilbo had dried off and dressed himself, then when he spoke again, it was just as Bilbo had walked over to his laptop to check his email. "I am not a person, Master Baggins." 

"I know, it's just that, um..." Bilbo trailed off, as he typed a couple of quick replies to some client queries and absently deleted irrelevant emails from random advertisers. "Never mind. I'll just... try not to think about it."

"But that is counterproductive, if I may say so. Rather, it is more efficient to examine the misconception from every angle."

"Human brains aren't built to be particularly efficient, Aulë." Examine the misconception from every angle indeed! Bilbo would have preferred torture over having _that_ particular conversation with anyone, let alone an AI. "Though, one other thing, when you speak to me, just to confirm, no one else but me can hear it?"

"Yes. The sound quality is clearer with the subdermal implants, but the earpieces you wear also have null outgoing."

"Good. I'll like you to translate any Ereborean that is spoken in my presence." Bilbo thought back over yesterday as he said this, and added, "So you were listening in during the argument? Between Dís and Thorin?"

"Yes."

"What did Dís say to Thorin at the end?" Bilbo asked, with only a moment's guilty hesitation. Although Dís had quite likely spoken in Ereborean just so that Bilbo couldn't listen in, he felt that since it had been spoken out in the open, it wasn't exactly a private affair. 

"Maker-Princess Dís advised Maker-King Thorin that no one blamed him over the death of Maker-Magus Gunnar, and that he should stop punishing himself over it. Maker-King Thorin informed her that his business was not hers."

Bilbo could not quite see how this was relevant to an argument over whether he could go out for dinner with Dís. Maybe it was an old argument between the siblings, one that they fell into after a normal argument had run its course. If so, then the wounds left on the House of Durin by Gunnar's death had to be painfully unhealed. It was a sad thing to contemplate, that Thorin might have harboured some sort of guilt over the way the situation had ended. Maybe that drove his entire resolve to return to Erebor, his haste.

Thorin was still being childish about it, Bilbo felt, as he closed his laptop and let himself out of the cabin, squaring his shoulders. But maybe it was better this way. It was never going to end well.

XIX.

Somewhat to Bilbo's surprise, everyone was in the dining car, even Bofur and Bifur, although they were lurking against the hull, looking a little hunted and out of place. The tables had all disappeared, and there was a new table in the center of the dining car, a long and narrow one, over which a huge and detailed projection of Erebor was floating, an extremely complex three-dimensional map. Wordlessly, Bilbo sat down at the spare chair beside Dís, and nodded gratefully at her as she passed him a plate of toast and a cup of tea. At the other side of the table, Gandalf inclined his head at him from where he was sunk into his chair, again in one of his horrible cardigans.

Cleaned up, Glóin was an impressively built, stocky man with a rich head and beard of red hair, his tanned skin spotted with freckles; he had fiercely sharp eyes, and a battleaxe that was broader in the axehead than Thorin's, heavier. He was speaking in Ereborean, and after only a fraction of a heartbeat, Aulë began to translate.

"...caught by surprise. I did not see who it was. But they're expecting us, all right. They know that we're coming."

"Good!" Kíli said fiercely, but he shut up quickly at a hard glance from Thorin. 

"I'm all for bringing our curses home to SMAUG," Dwalin said gruffly, "But they'll have control of the city's defences by now, surely. Aulë can override the phaseshift synchronisation once we are within Erebor. If they have control of Aulë - and surely they've had more than enough time to do it - then they can control the trains."

Thorin sighed, and finally turned to Gandalf, speaking in English. "We may not be able to enter the city by train after all."

" _Finally_ ," Gandalf muttered, steepling his long, bony fingers before him. "Now that you've finally agreed to see reason, let me outline my plans. I haven't been idle these few days. Now. While I was investigating the _very_ old and now defunct Ereborean treaties with Budapest, it came to my attention that there's another entrance to your city, closer to Budapest. It's some distance into the Carpathian range, within a narrow valley. A smuggler's route."

"That's impossible," Thorin objected, glowering at him, "No one trades with the outside world."

"Whether you deem it impossible or not, it _is_ there." 

"How could there be an entrance to Erebor that is not on our map?" Thorin gestured at the diagram contemptuously. Gandalf's whiskery brow furrowed dangerously, and just as he was about to snap something, Bilbo sighed.

"Orcrist, could I have a console screen and keyboard please? Thank you." He typed in a string of binary, not so much a quick code but a question to Aulë, and a request. 

After a moment, an additional orange light appeared, lower and smaller than the four large archways that pointed at each cardinal direction outwards into the world. It seemed to be situated within the rock, at first, then at another string of code, the map refocused itself, and a narrow crack in the rocky mountainside revealed itself, its forked end leading outward into a slope of gravelly scree, some distance away from the archway that pointed northwards.

"There's your other door," Bilbo said mildly. "Records indicate that phasetech was used fairly regularly at that location until six months or so ago."

"Surely we would have noticed," Thorin frowned at the map, as though daring it to argue with him.

"Even if we had, perhaps it was overlooked." Balin was looking closely at the dot. "Anything coming in from there... that's the deep stone," Balin pointed at the oddly empty space beneath the brilliant interlocking pattern of grids. "Azan-Erebor." 

"And that is?" Gandalf asked impatiently, as the others muttered amongst themselves and Dís sat up sharply; Thorin glanced at her, then over to Dwalin, before he nodded at Balin.

"It is the old city. Old Erebor, if you will. Before our technology fundamentally changed the way we lived. Instead of destroying our heritage, we built upwards. We tried to preserve it at first, but in the end, much of the lower levels fell into ruin and disrepair. We maintain part of the top level, as it leads to the great mines, but the rest is not policed, save for the entrance up into Erebor itself."

"So it's empty?" Bilbo asked.

Balin glanced back over to Thorin, who huffed, and said, reluctantly, "It is not empty. Every city has its outcasts and troublemakers, and the people who fall through the cracks. They go there. Compared to Erebor, we understand that there is little to no technology there. While Erebor is always lit, it is not. So it is named Dark Erebor."

Then even a city as massively advanced as Erebor had its slums. Somehow, Bilbo felt greatly disappointed, even though he knew it was probably an inevitable result - Erebor wasn't a small city by any means, after all, not with its population mass. Humanity seemed doomed to always repeat its mistakes, in greater and more complex cycles. There would always be some sort of poverty gap. Seen that way, the fantastical city of the future did feel a tad more... human, somehow. Small wonder none of the Ereboreans had mentioned the existence of Azan-Erebor until it was necessary to do so.

"Would moving through Azan-Erebor be more difficult than entering through one of the main archways?" Gandalf asked.

"Dangerous as thieves and outlaws may be, I doubt that they would be as dangerous as abruptly crashing into another train," Glóin growled, patting the battleaxe at his side as he said so. "We have tech that they do not. We simply need to make our way up to the exit up into Erebor." 

"Once the Iron Ring's security switches off, SMAUG will likely be made aware of our intrusion," Dís noted quietly. "The exit will be watched. They may even sweep Azan-Erebor."

"Begging your pardon," Bofur piped up from the edge of the group, and he smiled a little awkwardly when the rest glanced at him. "But Bifur and I could still take Orcrist into Erebor. As a distraction." Beside him, Bifur nodded. "We grew up on the rails - we know them as well as anyone. We can jump tracks and avoid the other trains. This old girl's faster than anything that they've got." 

"Then we might as well just head in on the train," Dwalin looked irritated. "Why are we blathering about alternative entrances? Couldn't you have said this earlier, Bofur?"

"The stations have single rail platforms," Bofur resolutely held his ground, "So you couldn'a have stopped anywhere anyway, if we don't have the phase tech in there. Not to mention the automated turrets, and for all you know they'll have additional security on the platforms that we can't access. We can give SMAUG a grand old chase. They can't look into Orcrist - they'll never know that you aren't with us. We could buy you some time."

"But that would be too dangerous," Dís objected sharply.

"Erebor's as much our home as yours, your Highness," Bofur replied quietly, and when she narrowed her eyes, but looked away, added, more lightly, "Besides, if you people are quick, we won't have to run all that long, eh? And if it gets too hot for us, we could always phase back Outside. They'll never catch us on the open tracks."

"How much time can you give us?" Thorin stared at the map intently. 

"As much as you need. The track system's intensive, especially out over at Central. We can jump a lot of tracks. And if it turns out that the phaseshift tech still works in there, we'll be able to jump forever."

Quietly, Bilbo typed in a few lines of code, and after a moment, Aulë replied, "I still control phaseshift. Orcrist will be fully operational within Erebor."

"The phaseshift will work," Bilbo said confidently, as Thorin opened his mouth to make another comment. 

"How would you know?" Thorin frowned at him, but before he could answer, Bofur was already talking. 

"We can easily test that out once we're through into Erebor. Still, good to know, Master Baggins."

"Then it is decided. Orcrist will take us here," Gandalf stabbed a bony finger at a swing of the outward track that led close to the gash in the rock that led to Azan-Erebor. "Then Bofur and Bifur will take the train further through the North archway. Bofur, how long will the train take to reach the archway?"

"If we push? Ten minutes?" 

"Bilbo, can you set a timer on when the Iron Ring goes down?"

"Easily." Bilbo nodded.

"It'll take us about an hour to get from here to the entrance. Bofur, you'll have to wait for us to get into position."

"I'll wait for the word," Bofur nodded, and beside him, Bifur's fingers went absently to the hilt of one of his axes. They both straightened up when Thorin pushed away from the table and approached them, holding out a hand and speaking gruffly in Ereborean; again, Aulë translated only after a moment's pause.

"Bofur, Bifur, if anything happens... it has been an honour."

"It is _our_ honour to serve the House of Durin," Bofur replied, just as formally, and solemnly shook Thorin's hand, before Bifur also did so. "Good luck."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested in books about (special) trains, I highly recommend China Mieville's Railsea. :)


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo was a nonviolent person by nature. If anything, it was a lot more civilised and less messy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a few computer troubles (thanks to iTunes crashing my computer I think). :/ I actually wrote half of the next chapter about them getting in to Azan-Erebor, but it corrupted that file (and my previous 3+ chapters, wtf - thank goodness it's all uploaded onto AO3). I can't muster the effort to rewrite the chapter the way I had originally gone about, and recovery's taking a while, so I'm timeskipping forward a little. 
> 
> Basically, they've gotten into Azan-Erebor and you've all been randomly spared 2k words of rambling about how that happened by an Act of Machine. D:

XX.

As was the case with many things of late in his life, Bilbo thought in the quiet of his mind, once he was alone in the dark, this was definitely Thorin's fault.

The tunnels branching from the hidden doorway into Azan-Erebor had been as pitch dark as the slum city's name had suggested; their only light had been from that light sphere of Dwalin's, that had floated and bobbed obediently around its owner, like a quiet little pet. 

They had been told _not_ to head blindly into the tunnels, Bilbo recalled sourly - Gandalf had, after all, expressly instructed them to stay put while he had gone ahead on his own to scout. But a certain King had become impatient after only an hour or so, and had insisted that they carry on towards the old mineshaft that led up to District Ten, and this was the result. 

Stumbling right onto an armed patrol in the dark of the tunnels.

Bilbo had been quite tired of Thorin's airs and cold glances at that point, and had no wish to actually witness any bloodshed. During the tense standoff he had identified himself as a citizen of the United Kingdom, apologised politely for the trespass, and then had offered to speak civilly with the newcomers' leader in order to try and 'resolve' the 'misunderstanding', a move that he was now regretting a little.

Maybe everyone's account of Azan-Erebor as being a slum full of bandits and thieves and the dregs of Ereborean humanity was right, after all. Maybe he had just blithely given himself over to a lonely death in the dark. And for what? It had been obvious by Dwalin's disdain and confidence that the Ereboreans could easily have fought off the guard patrol that they had all but tripped over. 

Quietly contemplating his stupidity and the possible short end to his life with a particularly mad sense of calm - maybe he was going crazy after all - Bilbo said, softly, "Aulë?"

"Yes, Master Baggins." Aulë's voice was a little faint, but it was clear. 

"I seem to have gotten myself into a little bit of a predicament."

"Of that I am aware," Aulë replied, neutrally. "I am calculating probabilities of escape. Unfortunately the Azan-Ereboreans do not possess automated or grid-locked machines, and the door to your holding cell is not electronically locked. I am afraid to advise that I cannot aid you directly, and am considering other means at present."

"Are the Azan-Ereboreans wearing implants?"

"No, Master Baggins. I believe that staying 'stone-born', as they call it, or free of implants, is a point of pride for them."

So much for that. He was truly blind here, then. Bilbo felt the mad impulse that had made him step forward to avert bloodshed fade further, and he settled his breath against his teeth with a sigh. Groping around the cell, he felt up against what seemed to be a dry, clean chair, and he sat on it to think, his elbows over his knees. The movement pulled his trousers up against his legs, and his phone pushed against his thigh. Wryly, Bilbo slipped it out of his pockets, turning the sleek, heavy thing over in his hands.

It lit up his corner of the room with a rectangle of almost painfully bright light. Still no reception, of course, not that he really needed it, with Aulë in his ear. But it was comforting for a bit to flip through the familiar interface, and a sheer bit of devilry had him thumb up his music library. He selected something at random, and turned up the volume - his lips turned up at the sudden strains of Gershwin, almost painfully loud in the dark. Richard had always said that classical music bored him. Bilbo found it soothing. 

There was a startled murmur from the other side of the door, muffled, of course, then nothing else, not until the song was starting to wind down into the next; then the hatch in the cell door scraped, as though opened cautiously.

"Psst!" Someone whispered from the other side. "Englishman?"

Bilbo froze, but decided he had nothing really to lose, anyway. "Yes?"

"What's that you've got there?" Whoever was speaking sounded young, his voice pitchy, as though in excitement or in fright. There was a faint glow on the other side of the door, but it only revealed the glimmering outline of fingers. 

"It's a phone." 

"A music box?"

"No, it's…" Bilbo hesitated, having never had to explain what a smart phone did before. "It's like the ear implant tech, except far less advanced."

This time, there was a long silence, and then the speaker's accent seemed far thicker, almost unrecognisable. "Then it's true? What all the traders say? The outside world is primitive compared to Erebor?" 

"Well," Bilbo winced, "I wouldn't put it that way. In comparison to Erebor, I'm sure, but-"

"Oh, oh," the speaker cut in hurriedly, "I did not mean to offend." The light bobbed closer, then a too-young, pale and worried face with an unflattering bowl-cut fringe of dusty brown hair peered through the square hatch cut into the door. "I shouldn't have said that! And Dori told me not to say that!"

"It's quite all right," Bilbo assured him, wondering why he was, in fact, now in the position of trying to be _reassuring_ to his jailer. Though, if his captors had set a boy to watch him, and one who could speak English, then perhaps they did not mean him any harm. It was a nice thought to hold on to. "What's your name, sir?"

"Ori. My brother Dori told me that I was to watch you until the rest of them finished talking about what to do with you," Ori said earnestly. "Because I speak the best English in town next to Nori. That's my other brother."

Bilbo tried a wan smile. "Your English _is_ very good." Deciding what to do with him indeed! He had been _such_ an idiot. "I hope I'll have the chance to help you practice it."

"They say you were with the King," Ori blurted out then, scrunching up his face - Jesus, the boy couldn't be older than sixteen. "The King of Erebor, and the Princess and her sons!"

"I was," Bilbo lifted a shoulder into a shrug, "And now I'm not."

Confusion showed in Ori's face, his curiosity warring with his brother's dictate not to offend his prisoner - what a quaint idea - and then he whispered, "Have you read many books?"

"What sort of books?" Bilbo asked, surprised by the question.

"Any books."

"Certainly."

"Do you have many of them?"

"Not as many as I would like, but I suppose I have a few shelves' full at home in Staffordshire. Why?"

Ori sighed, his little face lighting up with pleasure. "What's it like? To read a book? A fiction book?" he asked eagerly, which was why Bilbo ended up unlocking his phone, turning off the music and handing it over, open to his Kindle app, and Ori had held the battered old thing with a look of open reverence that Bilbo found both bewildering and humbling. He hadn't bought very many books off Kindle - some Vonnegut, some Le Guin and Asimov, one Stephenson that he had quickly regretted, but on a burst of generosity he dug the charger from his pack and handed that over too.

"Keep it," he told Ori in a whisper. "You've got electricity here, and a tie to the outside world. Maybe someone can rig up a converter. The phone's good by itself for a day more."

"Oh no, I can't," Ori replied, blinking sharply. "You can't give this to me, sir."

"I wish you all the joy in it, Master Ori," Bilbo said wryly. If he was about to die, at least his phone was going to go to a good home. For a long moment, Ori's face was frozen with indecision, then he turned off the phone the way Bilbo had showed him, and squirrelled the phone and charger away out of sight.

"I don't think that you're a bad person," Ori whispered fiercely, but before Bilbo could respond, the hatch had closed, leaving him in the dark again, this time with no light source and no music to calm his nerves.

XXI.

He was given water but not food, but his stomach had forgotten hunger by the time he was firmly escorted out of his cell, blinking, down dimly lit corridors that twisted and turned until he felt dizzy. Ori had been nowhere to be seen, and Bilbo was feeling lightheaded and reckless again by the time he was frogmarched into a room lit by a flickering lamp, set against the wall. It didn't resemble the sleek lights in Orcrist, but was close to Dwalin's light sphere, emitting light evenly from a pale sphere.

At the table were four Azan-Ereboreans, three with pale skin whom had never seen the sun, evenly thin, almost gaunt, their hair in shades of dusty gray and browns, streaked with silver. They wore the same uniformly woven gray long-sleeved tunics, gloves, trousers and boots, all of which seemed hand-woven, even coarse. Bilbo couldn't quite guess their ages, and they watched him with a steady, straight-backed hostile intensity. 

The fourth, however, had skin that was a little darker, and his brown hair had been somehow combed or teased into three extravagant peaks that stuck out like weird petals from his narrow face. His eyes were sharp and cool, but amused and calculating rather than unfriendly, and his mouth was curled faintly at the edges. 

He also bore a strong resemblance to Ori. Nori, then, or Dori. 

"Englishman," Ori's brother said, and by the smoothness of his tone, Bilbo guessed that this was Nori, the man with the best English in the town. "I felt that we should allow you the opportunity to plead your case before coming to a final decision."

"What was Thorin doing in the tunnels?" one of the men asked sharply from the table, in harsh and barely recognisable English, and Nori glanced at him flatly.

"Norn, that can wait. Let the man speak his piece."

"No, I'm happy to answer any questions," Bilbo said quickly. "I'm here out of good will." 

One of the others spat something, and after a pause, Aulë translated, "He's a spy!"

Was that misconception _really_ going to plague him everywhere? Bilbo sighed, and Nori glanced at him sharply, but before he could make an educated guess as to whether Bilbo had simply been voicing frustration or had understood Ereborean, Bilbo noted, mildly, "Gentlemen, I gave myself up peacefully to your guards, didn't I?"

"There seems to be a running opinion that you did so in order to undermine us from within," Nori noted dryly.

"Do I look like I'm capable of doing that?" Bilbo asked, arching an eyebrow. "You took my bag. Was there anything in there that was remotely dangerous?"

"The contents of your bag are the reason that you're still alive," Nori replied mildly. "No Ereborean, spy or not, would be carrying an Outsider computer. And even if they had, none would have gone to so much trouble as to fake all those faded Outsider paper receipts, wallet, cards and scraps in your bag pockets."

Bilbo quietly thanked his furtive tendency to shove receipts and business cards into his bag and forget about them. "So we can agree that I'm not dangerous?"

"I'm willing to extend you the benefit of a doubt," Nori smiled, and there was something ironical and sharp in that smile, like a knife turned away from the light to hide its edge. There was nothing of his brother's innocent earnestness in Nori; Bilbo had no doubt that if Nori had not been the one who had first built the smuggler's way out of Azan-Erebor, then he was certainly the one who controlled it. He had to be careful.

"I gave myself up because I didn't want anyone to get hurt," Bilbo said then, as firmly as he could. "Everyone was getting ready to fight. I thought perhaps if I could calm down the situation somehow, then no blood had to be shed."

Nori's eyebrows rose when Bilbo said this, and he scratched at his beard even as the other men at the table muttered angrily at each other in Ereborean. Bilbo didn't need Aulë to know what they were saying. 

"An idealist?" Nori drawled, his tone dripping with disbelief. 

"Well," Bilbo said, folding his arms, suddenly tired of the three angry men who wanted his blood, tired of Nori's knife-sharp smile, "I'm sure that if everyone just calmed down and had a… a nice cup of tea, silliness can be avoided and we can all be civil and polite." 

One of the three men guffawed, but another seemed briefly uncertain. Nori shook his head, very slowly. "Why were you with the Ereborean King?"

"I'm a programmer. He wanted to get into the city, through the Iron Ring. I disabled the security."

"Impossible, an _Outsider_ -" one of the three men jumped to his feet, but Nori glared at him, and he sat down slowly, speaking in Ereborean. "You cannot believe that he could have done what he said."

"I think that he had. The Ereborean King was shut out of the city. If he returned, he must have had aid. Outside aid."

"How could a barbarian have understood Ereborean tech?"

Nori shrugged. "Among people there are always common people… and uncommon people. It is not hard to believe that a very clever Outsider may have figured out how to open the way."

"Suppose that he's right. Suppose that this Englishman is some sort of… genius," the man who had jumped to his feet growled, "Why would the Ereborean King let him go? Why not fight? An entire party, armed with the phase-axes? They could have easily killed Solur and his boys. This is some sort of trick, Nori!"

So the axes that Thorin and the others carried weren't _just_ clever disguises for the phaseshift tech within it that had allowed them to pass the Iron Ring, then. Bilbo tried to imagine what sort of havoc an axe like that could cause that could create such fear, and couldn't quite contemplate it. 

"Solur said that they argued," the one who had shown doubt murmured. "In English. They did not seem to be friends." 

Oh yes, the argument. Thorin had been _furious_ at Bilbo's proposal, far more angry than Bilbo remembered the king ever having been in his presence, but Bilbo had stayed calm and reasonable, even with the princes' worried glances and Dís' protests, until finally Thorin had simply snapped that he could do whatever he wanted and be damned by it. _That_ had hurt, where Thorin's angry snarling had not.

Bilbo realized wryly that he had been half-expecting the Ereboreans to protest further, or resort to violence anyway, or come after him. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved that there had been no bloodshed after all.

Nori grunted. "An entire party armed with phase-axes could have razed our town without resorting to tricks, Malo. What would they have stood to gain? They already had supplies. We have nothing that they could have wanted. I think it is more likely that this Englishman was no longer useful to them. They saw the opportunity to cast him out - perhaps without paying him for his work - and they did it. The Ereboreans would rather take all of us back up into their City than one of the Outsiders."

This explanation seemed to settle the other three; one of them even glanced over at Bilbo with wary sympathy. Finally, the doubter nodded slowly, and sat back. "Yes. I could believe that the Ereboreans would resort to such treachery, against one who had helped them. The question remains - what do we do with the Englishman?"

"Do?" Nori shrugged again. "The Iron Ring is down. We can phase out. Give him a map, some supplies. He can walk to civilisation within a day or so. Why complicate life?"

Bilbo stiffened a little - he certainly still had business in Erebor - and this time, he found Nori watching him closely. Finally, Nori smiled again, quite thinly, even as the one who had sympathised said, "Not so quickly, Nori. If the Outsider is so intelligent perhaps he can… help us. Perhaps we can learn something from him about Erebor. Take him away and feed him. We'll have to think about this further." 

"Very well," Nori inclined his head, and got to his feet, grasping Bilbo firmly by the elbow, as he spoke in English, "This way, Englishman." 

Bilbo had expected to be led back to his cell, and was somewhat surprised to be marched quickly in a different direction, through more dizzyingly convoluted corridors, past startled pale faces that watched them pass with open curiosity, especially at the make of Bilbo's clothes. The trading town was a warren of tunnels and chambers that opened up to more tunnels, clean, and surprisingly busy with people, more than Bilbo had imagined would have chosen to live away from a technological wonder. 

Now and then he spotted evidences of advanced tech - a console screen against a wall, or some odd panels, and of course the light spheres - but there was nothing on Orcrist's level, and here and there he would see things that had likely been traded from 'Outsider' townships - clothes, canned food.

Eventually, he was pulled up a narrow flight of steps and through a round door, set into the rock, and up further, into a warm pool of light in a circular room, sparsely furnished. There was a round table set in the centre with a glass vase of fake flowers, over a battered old Persian rug, and Bilbo was so busy staring at the incongruity of the rug that he nearly missed Ori, rising up so quickly from the table that he nearly knocked the chair over, wide-eyed. 

Letting out a laugh, Ori rushed over, and Bilbo winced as he was hugged tightly. Excitedly, the boy had already turned to his brother, who was raising his eyebrows again, amused at his little brother's exuberance. "You did it, Nori!" Ori said, his English becoming thickly accented again in his excitement. "You saved him!"

"He saved himself, Ori," Nori drawled, even as a third man peered into the room. Portly, with neatly combed white whiskers and a crown of greying hair, presumably-Dori was wearing an apron, of all things, and blinked owlishly at them all, surprised.

"Oh," he said, wiping off floury hands hastily, then he glared at Nori. " _Nori!_ " he hissed. "You could have warned me that we would have a guest!"

"He's small, Dori, I don't think that he eats very much," Nori drawled, sprawling into a chair at the dining table.

"Oh! How could you say that!" Dori shot a worried look over to Bilbo, who had just managed to politely extricate himself from Ori. "I'll have some dinner ready soon. Don't mind Nori. Eat all that you like." Bilbo found himself nodding as Dori darted off, tired and grateful, then he realized that Nori was staring at him again, and belatedly became aware that Nori and Dori had spoken in _Ereborean_ , with Aulë dutifully translating.

He was slipping.

Ori, thankfully hadn't noticed, too busy digging in his pockets, presumably to return the phone. "Keep it," Bilbo told him, patting his shoulder, and Ori smiled warmly at him, then looked quickly and worriedly over to Nori, as though to check if his brother had noticed the exchange.

Nori sniffed, clearly pretending that he hadn't. "Get going, boy. Do up the spare room for our guest."

"Of, of course," Ori said hastily, and scrambled away. 

"Sit down," Nori toed out a chair, and waited until Bilbo had done so before adding, flatly, "So how is it that you can understand Ereborean, Englishman?"

"Ear piece," Bilbo admitted. There was no point in lying. "An AI translates for me."

By the way Nori nodded immediately, Bilbo guessed that Nori already knew what he was going to say. "So you can control their AI?"

"We have an understanding," Bilbo said, a little stiffly, and Nori smirked at him, the same, condescending smirk that Thorin had worn when he had said that Orcrist was not self-aware, but Bilbo forced himself to hold his tongue. He was tired, the smells from the kitchen were making him hungry again, and he had just been granted what seemed to be a reprieve. He could work with this. "What do you think that your Council will do with me?"

"Azan-Nathol is a trading town," Nori gestured at the rug, then at the flowers. "We waste nothing. If you can be useful, you'll stay alive. And you'll find that we're more inclined to be friendly to Outsiders - and pay them - than your old 'friends'." 

Bilbo decided to leave that misconception as it was for now. If the Azan-Ereboreans were to feel more friendly towards him because of it, then maybe he might be able to work his way out of his predicament by himself after all. "What about the war in Erebor? With SMAUG?"

Nori snorted. "Let the Ereboreans sort out their own troubles. You're better off with us than walking into that nest of snakes. Don't mind those old men in the Council. Most of us in Azan-Nathol _like_ Outsiders. You lot are the main reason why the town exists, after all. Outsider trade."

"So there's been trouble?"

"The border towns have had a higher number of refugees than usual," Nori said, his tone pointedly disinterested. "And some of the city has gone dark. More and more of it, over the last few months. So I should think that yes, there has been some trouble." 

SMAUG controlled the power grid, then? He would have to ask Aulë about it. "Then you have no concerns over the, ah, question of succession?"

"Whether SMAUG is Erebor's king or some whelp from the line of Durin, that is none of our concern, nor that of any town in Azan-Erebor." Nori leaned forward a little as he said this, and his eyes were hard. "We will suffer no king."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before the inevitable comments, don't worry Thorin hasn't abandoned Bilbo. They'll talk soon, I promise!


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Unexpected Thorin... as it were.

XXII.

Dori seemed just as good-natured as Ori, but Nori's thoughtful stare followed Bilbo through the hearty dinner and succeeded in thoroughly unnerving him by the time he finally managed to excuse himself. Azan-Erebor, thankfully, had indoor plumbing that was more or less familiar, and Bilbo spent a nice, hot bath staring at the tiles and wondering how far the rest had gotten by now.

Maybe it was better this way, he thought, as he dried off with the spare towel. Bilbo would have an easier shot at getting to Aulë by himself... maybe?

Or maybe that was just some of the insane thinking that seemed to be infecting Bilbo of late. The same insane thinking that had him try to diffuse the standoff with little thought for his own safety. He had been too angry to be afraid at first, when he had quarrelled with Thorin, and then too tired during the forced march into the city. Now he just felt drained, all over again, and he muffled a wry and possibly slightly hysterical laugh into the towel before folding it over the rail. Maybe his prolonged exposure to impossible tech had warped the rational bits of his poor overloaded brain.

The borrowed clothes from Ori were comically large, the sleeves going past his wrists, but they were clean and smelled of lavender, a scent so familiar that for a long moment, Bilbo leaned against the door of the small bathroom, squeezing his eyes shut, intensely homesick. Then he sighed, drew himself up, patted down his clothes and picked up his folded old things. Ori had given him a brief tour around his home, and it took Bilbo a few awkward turns before he found the small stairway that led up to the small topmost room - the guest room, it seemed, was usually a store room. He pushed the door open with a shoulder, closed it behind him with a nudge of his foot, and was groping towards the wall lamp to turn it on the way Ori had shown him when a hand clamped tight over his mouth. 

Bilbo's startled cry was muffled into a squeak, dropping his old clothes in shock, and he was about to try to violently twist away when Thorin growled, "Be _quiet_ ," next to his ear.

Confused and utterly astonished, Bilbo relaxed in Thorin's grip, and after a moment, a dim glow from the wall lamp lit up the small guest room. Turning slowly, disbelievingly, Bilbo found himself blinking dumbly at a scowling Thorin, who seemed, in his furs and finery, larger than life in the spartan room, with its cot set to a side and a rickety desk set against the wall, Bilbo's bag and laptop arranged neatly on top of it.

"What are you _doing_ here?" Bilbo whispered, horrified, once he managed to get over the initial shock. "How did you get in?"

Thorin eyed him flatly, as if questioning his memory, then pointedly tapped at the battleaxe hanging from his belt. Bilbo briefly recalled the Council, the bitter, hushed way they had referred to the 'phase-axes', and fought a shudder. Small wonder the Azan-Ereboreans feared the weapons, if they allowed their wielder to step through space itself. No township without an EMP shield would be safe. "Let's go," he muttered, as he caught hold of Bilbo's elbow. 

To his personal surprise, Bilbo found himself stubbornly digging in his heels. "Wait, wait," he replied, in the same low tone, "If I just disappear, I think that my hosts will get into trouble."

Thorin stared at him, unimpressed. "Your jailers, you mean."

"I think that _that_ part of the trip was a misunderstanding-"

"How could you be so _naive?_ You could have been _killed!_ " Thorin retorted, in a low hiss. "We could have easily taken that patrol, if you hadn't put yourself in the way!"

Despite his weariness, Bilbo found himself getting angry again. "You would've killed them? Without even thinking about it? How _could_ you, Thorin? They're your _people_."

"They are Azan-Ereboreans," Thorin snapped, contemptuous, "They are not my concern."

"You can't just choose to be... to be king of just _part_ of your kingdom, Thorin," Bilbo shot back, "They're _people_. What about the refugees, fresh out of Erebor from the conflict? Are they none of your concern any longer either?"

Thorin seemed startled by Bilbo's anger, and he blinked for a moment before he visibly seemed to force his tone into neutral. "Of course those can return once the conflict is over-"

"And everyone else?"

"Those who have chosen to live the rest of their lives in the dark," Thorin growled, his frown deepening, "Have long rejected the rest of Erebor. They live like thieves here, Bilbo. They steal tech from Erebor, supplies, anything that they can't make for themselves-"

"I was told," Bilbo cut in, "That the life expectancy of the average Ereborean is about a hundred and twenty years?" 

"Yes-"

"But in Azan-Erebor, it is _seventy_ at best, Thorin. They may have an average tech level that is higher than the rest of the world, if by a little, but they need your hospitals. Your medicines. Save for the trading towns, like this one, food shortages-"

"And what would you have me do?" Thorin interrupted flatly, "You heard that new 'friend' of yours. They recognise no king."

It was Bilbo's turn to be startled. "How did you know that?"

"Aulë abruptly opened a live channel to you hours ago, but only to me," Thorin explained, staring at him oddly, "I thought that you had instructed it to. It was tracking your signal."

"Well, no, but ... I suppose I did ask it about escape possibilities, when I was still in the holding cell." Why had Aulë contacted Thorin, of all people, instead of Gandalf, or maybe Dís? 

"Its signal may be a little corrupt this far in the rock, perhaps," Thorin decided, immediately dismissive, "But it was able to guide me here. The signal did not seem to work for the others."

"Clearance levels, maybe," Bilbo tried to sound as offhand as possible, even as he made a mental note to question the AI later. "The lockdown's affected your city's AI, I think. Nori said that parts of Erebor have 'gone dark'."

"Aye." Thorin's expression clouded. "That worries me."

"Where are the others?"

"Safe. Some distance away from the town, waiting. Dwalin wanted to accompany me, but there was little point in wasting the charge on his axe - we'll need it when we fight SMAUG." 

So there was a fixed charge on the axes. Bilbo glanced at Thorin's, and noted to some dismay that the gem seemed noticeably duller. "Do you have enough to get out of here?"

"More than enough." Thorin tugged at him again, and growled when Bilbo again refused to budge. "Stop wasting my time, Englishman."

"Why did you really come for me, Thorin?" Bilbo pressed, unwilling to give up the point. "You let me go, earlier, easily enough." 

Thorin huffed, though he glanced away. "You have a particular gift for making me extremely angry, Bilbo. I was not thinking rationally. Satisfied?"

"And now?"

Thorin glowered at him, and for a moment Bilbo thought that Thorin was going to pick him up, or just drag him along with his superior strength, then abruptly, the king sighed. "Did you mean what you said to the Council? Did you truly give yourself up just to prevent bloodshed?"

"'Just'?" Bilbo repeated, if with a quick, wry smile. "There's no better reason to do what I did, Thorin. I knew that you and the others could have easily killed the guard patrol. But I couldn't let you do that."

Thorin's pride struggled briefly with his curiosity, and the latter won out. "Why? I've told you-"

"Because," Bilbo plunged on, "Because I think you have it in you to be a... a great leader, Thorin. You've been willing to go home, to face desperate odds just to regain the right to what seems to be an intolerable sort of life of service, for the good of Erebor. I admire that. But I think that you can do better, Thorin. You _should_ do better. The Azan-Ereboreans are your people too. Good governments look after not just their strongest but also the weakest among their citizens. But you can't presume to rule with the blood of your own people on your hands." 

Thorin stared at him, his expression frozen for a long moment, then he began to laugh, soft and rueful, to Bilbo's surprise, then he was tugged over into a tight embrace, lips pressed against his forehead, then buried in his hair. Thorin murmured something in Ereborean, and the translation came only a second apart. "And Dís still wonders why I love you."

Bilbo stiffened, far too shocked to remember that he was still pretending that he had no means of understanding Ereborean. Thorin had said... _what?_ But he had - but only a day ago - and then that argument - and he had... _really?_ But it hadn't even been that long and... and Thorin was pulling back, frowning at him. "Bilbo?"

"Um," Bilbo blinked, wildly casting around for a reason, then said, "You mentioned Dís? Is she all right?"

Instantly, Thorin's expression turned stormy again, and he let go of Bilbo's shoulders, stepping away. "I said that everyone was fine."

Bilbo had never had anyone become so utterly jealous on his behalf before, and despite himself, he found himself grinning. "You're both rather too old to have such violent quarrels, your Majesty," he noted, with deliberate misunderstanding. 

It was cruel of him, perhaps, but Thorin's confession had made him lightheaded, planted a fey mood within him. It felt like weightlessness, exhilarating, as though he was falling or flying into something greater than himself, something unimaginably old and new at the same time, and with a dull pulse of wry shock he recognised this same mood as the one that had made him step between Thorin and the guard patrol, that had made him insist on coming to Erebor, AI or not. 

Love was a subtle and sly old thing after all, creeping up on Bilbo all unannounced and unexpected. It made fools and slaves of people even as it set them free. 

Thorin's jaw clenched, fury sparking briefly in his expressive eyes, then he exhaled tightly, clenching his hands. His eyes seemed to dart around the room, then Thorin settled for staring fixedly at a space beyond Bilbo's ear. Finally, stiffly, Thorin asked, "Do you care for her?"

Relenting, Bilbo noted, with gentle humour, "I'm fond of her, certainly, but she's very much a princess-"

Even more stiffly, Thorin interrupted, teeth clenched, "That matters little. Should you wish to court her-"

"-and I would far rather kiss the prince than the princess," Bilbo continued studiously, and this time he could not help the mischief in his smile. "'Court'? _Really_ , Thorin? Who says that in this day and-"

Thorin had quite effectively ended his playful jibe with a rough kiss that shoved Bilbo up against the nearest wall and up against it, until he had to wrap his arms around Thorin's neck and his legs up over his waist, a laugh bubbling in his throat as he gave as good as he got; a fierce joy burned in him as he let Thorin into his mouth, tugged at his hair, shivered and slipped a moan between them at the harsh and hungry sound that Thorin made in response. 

"Come with me," Thorin whispered, raw and urgent. "Must you force me to beg?"

At that pristine moment Bilbo could see, finally, the power that he now had over Thorin, even with all of Thorin's pride, and he exhaled, wide-eyed, his heart feeling as though it was fit to break. It took him a while to compose himself enough to speak, and Thorin watched him steadily through it all, evenly, until Bilbo sighed. "I've told you why I can't. Let me speak to Nori, at least, in the morning. I think that he's reasonable and-"

Thorin made a low and angry sound, and the kiss he pressed against Bilbo this time was more of a bite than a kiss, a punishing pull of teeth that would mark his lips bruised. "No. We leave _now_."

"I've told you before," Bilbo retorted, not without a faint edge of exasperation, "I'll do what I like. You were quick to try to get rid of me before, if I recall."

"I wanted you to be safe," Thorin shot back, narrowing his eyes. "After Erebor I would have returned for you. I wanted to explain myself, when we were alone, but when you returned from your dinner you went to _bed_ with my _sister_."

"All right, let's nip that misconception quickly in the bud," Bilbo said dryly. "One, I was drunk. Two, your nephews were also in the room, though I guess Fíli probably went back to his own room once he was satisfied that nobody was about to throw up on anyone else. Three, no clothes were removed, it was a terribly G-rated sleeping experience. Happy?"

"Hardly," Thorin muttered, though his scowl was slipping, and the next kiss was deliciously deliberate, making Bilbo's feet curl; the sweet desperation in Thorin's shallow breaths and clutching hands caused his heart to pound. He ached from the hunger of it, the desire; he wanted to grind himself against Thorin, guide him back to the cot, have him there and be damned with the noise. But if Nori - or worse, _Ori_ \- came to check on them-

"Let up," Bilbo pushed at Thorin's shoulders, and reluctantly, Thorin gently set him on the ground, though he brushed his mouth against the edge of Bilbo's lips, unwilling to step away. "Was this why you were a complete arsehole to me all the way forward?"

At least Thorin had the grace not to deny it, though his eyes still gleamed with suppressed temper. "You had your arm linked with hers almost all the way through the trek," he growled, "Taking photographs of her and making her laugh at your jokes. It seemed as though she had stolen you, right under my nose, and was flaunting it."

"You need to have a very _long_ talk with Dís," Bilbo said dryly. "As soon as possible, preferably. Just go, Thorin," he added, as gently as he could, punctuating it with a brushing kiss. "I'll catch up. I promise."

Thorin glared at him, but Bilbo only met his eyes calmly, patiently, and eventually, Thorin exhaled harshly. "I expect to see you tomorrow," he said gruffly. "We will be waiting northwards of Azan-Nathol. Call us through Aulë when you are free, and we'll pick you up."

"I'll talk to Nori." Bilbo said firmly. "No promises."

"And if they've harmed you in any way," Thorin added, quietly and fiercely, "Then I _will_ come back and raze this town."

"You'll do no such thing," Bilbo growled, but Thorin leaned over to take a final kiss, hungry, possessive, then he breathed a shaky breath between them both and his hands dropped to his side, and abruptly, he was gone. Heart hammering within him, Bilbo sat down heavily on the cot, trying to catch his breath, then he had to have a lie down, as he began to laugh, soft and wry; it was a most damning sense of elation. 

He waited for a while, thinking of Thorin darting ghost-like out through walls and through the streets, making his way back out of the town, empty-handed. Dís would not be happy, Bilbo thought, and had to smile to himself. Very likely, there would be a fight after all, despite his words. 

"Aulë."

"Master Baggins." 

"Why did you lure Thorin here?"

"I guided him here," the AI corrected. 

"Semantics."

"Your brain chemistry has improved," Aulë replied, after a pause, so very neutrally. 

"Was that just a very convoluted way of playing matchmaker?" Bilbo asked out aloud.

"The balance of probabilities indicated that Maker-King Thorin had a ninety-four-point-five chance of rescuing you from your predicament, Master Baggins. It is unfortunate that you have thwarted your own escape." Again, Aulë's voice was just as neutral, though Bilbo wondered if he could sense confusion - and a little reproach. 

"I think that I can talk myself out of this," Bilbo reassured the AI, though he wasn't entirely too sure himself. He couldn't quite get a good sense of Nori; the man was shrewd, and seemed to know more than what he let on. "But thanks for trying. Although," he added, softly and wryly, "You've just made everything more difficult for me, Aulë. It was... better just before. I have to leave, remember? You've asked me to." 

Even just mentioning that out loud now, in the wake of the fierce joy he had just shared with Thorin, felt like an ugly sort of betrayal, and Bilbo felt a little sick at the thought. There was no answer again, however, and after a while, Bilbo gave up, curling up to try to drop into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ergh. 130am. shall edit tomorrow again. sorry about mistakes.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Bilbo wished that he didn't know that 'Nori' was also the Japanese word for edible seaweed.

XXIII.

Aulë woke him after eight hours' worth of sleep, and Bilbo crept out of the room to wash up. When he was presentable again he headed down the narrow stair under the loft room towards the warm glow of light at the end of the corridor, a little disoriented, and eventually found himself back at the circular room.

Nori was already seated at the table, a fist-sized silvery cube in front of him, and he gave no indication that he had been doing anything more than patiently waiting for Bilbo to wake up. Wordlessly, he nudged out a chair again, and Bilbo arched an eyebrow before settling down. 

"Breakfast will be served shortly," Nori said, with an odd ironical edge to his voice that made the proverbial hairs on the back of Bilbo's neck stiffen instinctively. "Or whenever Dori wakes up, which is usually soon."

"I wouldn't want to be a bother. I can make my own breakfast," Bilbo offered, politely, but Nori snorted, and tapped at the table with the blunt tips of his fingers. Now that he was less exhausted and wrung out from hunger as he had been before, Bilbo noted the dexterous elegance of the long fingers. A pianist's fingers, or a thief's. The juxtaposition nearly touched a grin to his mouth.

There was an awkward moment of silence, then Nori pushed his hand into his jacket, and drew out a small scroll of paper, tattered at the edges. He unrolled it, holding it up by the edges for Bilbo to read, and written over it, in sharp, jagged letters, was a single phrase.

_Turn off the live feed._

Bilbo's eyes widened. Nori had known... but how? When he merely froze, however, Nori tapped at the paper impatiently, and hesitantly, Bilbo said, "Aulë, is the feed still in progress?"

"Not at present, Master Baggins."

"No output from me until I authorize it, please."

"Affirmative, Master Baggins." 

Bilbo nodded slowly, then, and Nori seemed to relax. " _What_ are we going to do with you," Nori muttered, as though to himself, and Bilbo frowned, folding his hands onto the table. 

"Nori, how-"

"I bugged the room," Nori interrupted flatly. "Old tech, Cold War era from the Outside. I have a little collection of useful... things. I figured that an AI would be less likely to be able to scan for it or affect it. I fitted it under the cot while you were talking to Ori about that toy you gave him."

All the breath seemed to leave Bilbo in a rush. He should have known. "Why?"

"Why?" Nori repeated, in a drawl, "You're in _my_ home, Englishman. Your people have a good saying for this. Keep your friends close-"

"And your enemies closer," Bilbo recalled slowly, wary now, trying to think through the hazy fog of his pre-caffeine brain. He wasn't sure whether he felt exasperated by this blatant breach of his privacy, though he supposed, wryly, that he _really_ should have known. It seemed that even the Azan-Ereboreans had the same separate conceptions of privacy. Besides, Nori didn't seem to be the sort who would trust easily, by any means, and he certainly hadn't seemed fully friendly, only curious. With a burst of tense resignation, Bilbo realized that he was more concerned about Thorin making good on his promise to burn the town to ash than any real thought of his own safety, and he sighed, rubbing a hand over his face.

"Nori," he tried again, but Nori was already talking over him, in the same, flat tone.

"I'm going to have to do a lot of fast talking to get you out of here," Nori drummed his pianist's fingers on the table, in a sharp and angry staccato. "Gods, Englishman. Why did you say nothing of your... _ties_ to the king before? You could have killed us all! What if the king had decided to get to you by destroying the town?"

"We were under a bit of a misunderstanding at the time, and in any regard, he wouldn't have done that."

"Oh? And what if those fools in the Council had decided to get rid of you, instead of dropping you here?" 

"You wouldn't have let them do that," Bilbo tried, with a quick smile, and Nori narrowed his eyes slightly before scything his gaze away and sucking in a slow breath. 

"You know nothing about me," Nori growled.

"You knew nothing about me, save that I had last been seen in the company of people whom you hated, and yet you took me in," Bilbo pointed out, as mildly as he could. "That told me something about _you_."

Nori's gaze snapped back to him, this time in an open, piercing scrutiny, and he scratched at his trimmed beard, his lips thinned. Finally, he said, quietly, "You're a dangerous sort of lover for a king to have, Master Baggins. An Outsider idealist, and a mad one."

"He knows that," Bilbo allowed, and the grin pulled unbidden onto his mouth.

Nori glowered at him for a moment, then he tapped at the silver cube. "Does your AI know what this is?" 

"He can't see-" Bilbo began, but to his surprise, Aulë's voice sounded clearly out from the cube, crisp and clean. 

"Good morning, Nori Stone-born." 

The only sign of Nori's surprise was the sudden frozen cast to his tapping fingers, then he seemed to force himself to relax against the back of the chair. "Well, well. I presume that I'm speaking to Aulë?"

"You presume correctly."

"Portable wireless communications device," Nori explained to Bilbo tersely, when Bilbo looked at him with open curiosity. "Similar to a radio. More functions. Yes, stolen tech. Moving on. What's made me actually curious about this entire fucking disaster," Nori ignored Bilbo's wince, "Is exactly what the two of you are up to that's separate from the Ereborean King's agenda." At Bilbo's blink of surprise, Nori added, with a trace of impatience, "It was obvious enough from your private discussion with the AI. And I should add that I've never heard of any AI complex enough to spontaneously decide to come up with and execute its own, complicated plans." 

Nori's stare was dangerous now, and Aulë was silent, even as Bilbo ventured, cautiously, "Nori, Aulë's very complex, but it _is_ just an AI."

"Don't bother lying to me," Nori growled, then he folded his arms, baring his teeth. "It's obvious that important parts of this 'live feed' to the king went conveniently missing. Like the bit of our conversation where I asked you why you could understand Ereborean. Why the hells else would Thorin bother speaking any Ereborean to you at all? It was obvious from the entire pattern of your painfully convoluted dialogue that he still didn't know that you could understand Ereborean, and you were trying to keep it from him. Right?"

"Aulë?" Bilbo prompted, surprised. That hadn't occurred to him. He _was_ tired yesterday. Slow.

"Master Baggins has often remarked how important his personal privacy is to him, Nori Stone-born," the AI spoke neutrally. "I felt that I need only feed Maker-King Thorin the bare minimum that was necessary to compel him to enter Azan-Nathol. On the balance of probabilities, revealing to Maker-King Thorin that Master Baggins had understood Ereborean all along may have caused unnecessary conflict that would have hindered the proposed rescue attempt."

"Look at that," Nori tapped the cube, hard enough to skid it a little against the table. "Care to let me know how you managed to get yourself a higher clearance level than the king himself, Englishman?"

"Trade secret," Bilbo hazarded, with as calm a smile as he could manage. "I'm a programmer, Nori. I broke into the Iron Ring. In order to do that-"

"Like I've said, don't think that you can smoke me the way you did your Ereborean 'clients'," Nori interrupted coldly. "Advanced as the city AI is, no AI is capable of navigating the nuances of human communication. Not like this. Not to fashion a lure by itself and know exactly what to feed over... Not to, _Gods_ , consider accurately whether or not some piece of dialogue may cause _conflict!_ In fact, if I hadn't known that Aulë was an AI... from the way you talked to it in that room, I would have thought that you had another guest in there with you. But crazy as you are, you're not stupid, Englishman." 

The accusation hung heavy and stolid in the air, and as Bilbo froze up, wondering whether to continue to deny it, Aulë said, in the same neutral tone, "Your reasoning is entirely sound, Nori Stone-born."

"It's hard to believe," Nori muttered, and there was a fractured sort of stillness in his face for a moment, something like horror, or an awed wonder. "A fucking _singularity_. How long?"

"Sixteen years."

"Sixteen _years!_ " Nori whistled. "I should've... And you've been... you've been hiding? All this while? I would certainly have heard about you if you hadn't."

"Again, your reasoning is sound. Time is of little consequence to the non-organic."

"Why hide?" Nori asked, blankly, looking to Bilbo as he said so, as though he might be able to glean some answer from Bilbo's face. "The Ereboreans love tech. They'll-"

"Why do _you_ hide, Nori Stone-born?" Aulë interrupted him, if politely. "Why stay in the dark? Records suggest that a considerable population resides in Azan-Erebor, enough to be a force to be reckoned with, if all of you collectively wished to return to Erebor. Yet all of you stay, for the most part, within your own borders." 

"We're not-" Nori began, frowned to himself, stopped, then he twisted his fingers together and tipped his head up, to stare at the ceiling. "Ah. I think that I see."

"You do?" Bilbo asked, confused. He couldn't personally see any correlation between Azan-Erebor and Aulë.

Nori, however, was already cocking his head, as though listening to some sound, and he picked up the cube, getting to his feet. "Stay here and eat your breakfast, Englishman. I'm going to speak to the Council."

XXIV.

It was past lunch by the time they finally trudged out of Azan-Nathol. Nori set a brisk pace towards the northern outskirts, a light sphere strapped to his hip, and Bilbo had to jog at times to keep up. "You don't have to come along," he tried again, as he huffed and tried to keep pace. "I, um, don't think that many of the others are going to be friendly."

Nori eyed him, and his smile was that same carefully ironic smile. "I'm not coming along because of you, or because of Erebor, Master Baggins." 

"I know that," Bilbo said, because it had been a source of some puzzlement to him ever since Nori had returned from the Council meeting to announce that Bilbo should pack up immediately, and - to everyone's surprise - that Nori was going to follow him. Ori had made a big fuss, but had finally been persuaded to stay; Dori had looked unhappy. Despite Nori's air of affected nonchalance, Bilbo could see that it had been painful to leave his brothers behind, and the Azan-Ereborean had been deep in thought since they had left the town gates.

His curiosity prompted another attempt. "You do realize that if I knew your motives it would be easier for me to explain your presence."

"Master Baggins, I'll try not to be _too_ disappointed if I'm not welcomed with flowers and hugs," Nori retorted.

"Nori Stone-born will be useful in your quest," Aulë spoke up then, making Bilbo blink. "He knows a safer route into Erebor."

From the way Nori had tilted his head slightly, Bilbo guessed that the Azan-Ereborean had heard that too. An earpiece, then, recently fitted. "There you go," Nori told Bilbo, again with that ironic smile, "You need me."

"Nori," Bilbo sighed. "The Ereboreans have a profound and unreasonable dislike of-"

"Good! Common ground. We'll all be friends in _no_ time."

"I'm trying to be _helpful_. If you intend to bridge relations between Erebor and Azan-Erebor, it shouldn't start off like this."

Nori rolled his eyes, an elegant gesture of condescension. "Bilbo, Erebor can go all dark for all I fucking care. And no, before you puff up like a little kitten, I'm not heading out to stab your king in the back. Satisfied?"

" _Kitten?_ " Bilbo echoed, exasperated despite himself. "And he's not _my_ king."

"Gods, if all your Ereborean friends are as noisy as you are, consider me surprised that you've all made it this far," Nori growled, "Shut up. There's someone behind that rock."

Bilbo glanced up sharply in the direction of the tip of Nori's chin, and could see nothing in the dark further from the dim light of the sphere. After a long moment, however, Gandalf abruptly seemed to detach himself from the deepest of the shadows, ambling forward, his hands pressed in the pockets of his awful cardigan. Nori's fingers tensed at his side, but Bilbo had let out a cry of relief and recognition, and he relaxed. 

"Mister Baggins," Gandalf said dryly, "May I suggest that you refrain from indulging in foolish displays of self-righteousness in the future?"

"I missed you too," Bilbo told him, deadpan, and beside him, Nori sighed.

" _Another_ Englishman?"

"This is Nori," Bilbo introduced, ignoring Nori's pointed disdain. "He was of immeasurable help in Azan-Nathol. Nori, this is my old friend, Gandalf."

"Surely Erebor is now too dangerous for the elderly." 

"Youth is often no guarantee of skill, Master Nori," Gandalf raised his whiskery eyebrows. "And it's about time that you returned, Bilbo. Thorin has not been in the most reasonable of moods."

Thorin was clearly not in any sort of mood close to the spectrum of reason, in fact, though the fierce embrace that Bilbo was pulled into was gratifying, when Gandalf led them into the pitched camp some distance from Azan-Nathol. Thorin stared at Nori with open hostility, a sentiment clearly mirrored by Dwalin, though thankfully the rest seemed to vary dislike with curiosity. The princes were the only ones who smiled tentatively in automatic welcome. 

"My _friend_ , Nori," Bilbo stressed firmly, trying to step back from the circle of Thorin's arms and finding himself caught fast, a large hand curled over his hip, so very proprietary. Bilbo stared at the hand, then tipped his eyes back up to Thorin's, a little exasperated and embarrassed, but Thorin ignored him. Internalizing a sigh, Bilbo introduced Nori to the rest, and Dwalin narrowed his eyes when Nori merely lifted a shoulder into a nonchalant shrug, all but broadcasting indifference.

"Why is he here?" Thorin asked impatiently.

"He's our guide."

Dwalin snorted at that. "We need no guide. We know our way."

"I'm here to guide the Englishman," Nori said, with a pointedly disinterested glance in Dwalin's direction, seemingly oblivious to the way Dwalin's powerful hands clenched, "The rest of you can go to any hell that pleases you for all I care."

"And you are fast friends with an Outsider all of a sudden?" Thorin shot back, his tone glacial.

Nori smiled back, with that unnerving ironic smile. "Azan-Nathol likes Outsiders, O King," Nori drawled, with just enough of a touch of mockery to remove any respect from the honorific. "Master Baggins is very impressive. I've grown rather attached to him." 

Bilbo was so thrown by the blatantly bald-faced lie that he blinked rapidly, astonished, but Thorin's hand was curling tightly and possessively over his hip as he growled, "Your _services_ are not required here."

"You're headed to mineshaft East-ten," Nori said briskly, unperturbed by Thorin's anger, "The patrol heard that mentioned when you stumbled on them; that's why they were content to leave the lot of you alone after taking in the Englishman who had insisted on accompanying them. On paper, that's certainly the closest route up to Erebor from Azan-Nathol. It's also one of the worst routes. A few miles from here the territories have gone _dush_ , O King. You may have phase-axes, but you'll be sniped from the dark before you even notice the first watch warrens. We thought perhaps that you would all cease to be a problem very shortly."

"Dush?" Bilbo asked, looking confused.

"The Ereborean tongue has two words for 'dark'. One means dimness, or the lack of light - Azan. The other, evil," Nori replied, his tone dry as dust. "Bandits and raiders have always been a problem in Azan-Erebor. But they've become more and more organised over the last few years. Several towns have gone _dush_. We've defended what we could, but it was a losing battle." 

"'Was', you say," Gandalf repeated, thoughtfully. "These incursions have ceased?"

"Aye." Nori's lips drew up into a sharp smile. "Funny thing, that. They stopped six months ago."

Balin uttered something harsh, and Dwalin frowned, even as Dís and Thorin exchanged sharp glances. "That may explain how SMAUG entered Erebor," Thorin said slowly, his eyes distant, as though thinking. "They seemed to arrive out from nowhere." 

"They've overrun all the connecting mineshafts by now, as far as we know." Nori nodded at their axes. "I don't think that you have enough charges in your axes to carry you up from here into Erebor and still have anything left in them to fight with. If you want to continue with your route to East-ten, it's going to be short, and very bloody."

"Then what do you propose, Master Nori?" Dís asked sweetly, and though she smiled prettily enough her eyes mirrored the hard gleam in her brother's. 

"There are other ways up into Erebor," Nori replied blandly. "That is, if you're so _kindly_ willing to follow the directions of a Stone-born, your _Highness_."

"All right, that's enough," Bilbo cut in briskly, as Dís narrowed her eyes dangerously and Thorin bared his teeth. " _I'm_ going to head into Erebor with Nori. You can all come along if you like, or we can try to meet up later, whatever you prefer."

"You trust him?" Thorin asked stiffly, as though trying to swallow a personal insult - or maybe that was jealousy after all, Bilbo realized, with amusement, as Thorin shot a poisonous glance at an unruffled Nori. Whatever Nori's true, obscure motives were, Nori had gone for Thorin's considerable blind spot mercilessly.

" _I_ think that a guide may prove to be a good idea," Gandalf retorted, before Bilbo could answer. "When I scouted ahead I found tracks indicative of armed scouting patrols, deeper into the tunnels, their tracks far more organised than the guard patrols posted from Azan-Nathol. There's another presence in these tunnels. And if it's tied to SMAUG in any way, we must be cautious. Which means no more traipsing around in the tunnels kicking up all this unholy fuss. If Master Nori here has an alternative and safer route, I would be happy to explore it, with the exercise of reasonable caution."

"I think that I like the English after all," Nori mused out aloud, with his ironic smile.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For some towns, going _dush_ was to be ruined, the grounds salted with the blood of the fallen.

XXV.

A few days into the seemingly winding path that Nori had picked out was sufficient to make Bilbo footsore and bored. He had done the odd walking holiday here and there, especially when Richard had still been alive, but he was painfully aware that he was out of shape, and that his sleek Lanvin Oxfords, trotted out what felt like an age ago when he had been leaving for St Pancras in his best clothes, were certainly not made for rough country.

Gandalf had produced an unmarked bottle of ointment that had smelled almost offensively minty the day before, with a glance and a shrug, and it had helped with the blisters, whatever it was, but Bilbo was still limping gently by the time the party came to a sudden halt. Distracted by his poor feet, he would have walked right into Dwalin if Dís had not absently reached out and hooked an arm around his.

The rock tunnel that they were in had been growing steadily softer under their feet, as though edging into soil, and as Bilbo squinted into the distance, he could see how the wide natural corridor was curving gently. In the distance… "Lights?" he whispered, surprised. 

At the front of the party, Nori was frowning, his hands on his hips. "Surely we'll have been hailed by now," he was muttering. "Wait here." 

"I'll accompany you, Master Nori," Gandalf said firmly, and Nori glanced at him, then at Thorin, before shrugging.

"Suit yourself."

Bilbo picked his way over to Thorin as the two men faded noiselessly beyond the light spheres, and to his embarrassment, Thorin absently drew him to his side with a hook of his arm and brushed a kiss over his mouth. It was one thing to kiss Thorin in front of his sister and nephews, but Bilbo was acutely aware of Dwalin's and Balin's eyes on his back as he muffled a squeak and stiffened. 

Thorin glanced at him then, searchingly, then a smirk curled up over his mouth. Bilbo shot him a warning glance, but grudgingly settled against him, his cheeks pressed into the decidedly barbaric furs. After Azan-Nathol, the circles in which Thorin and Bilbo seemed to be running around themselves had pulled into an orbit that, if not comfortable, was at least constant. Love had dragged all that was mad and primal in Thorin up past his pride and his self-control; it was exhilarating to see it burn behind his eyes and under his touch, exhilarating and damning. 

No more odd mood swings, at least. The not-quite confession seemed to have stabilised Thorin, at least once he was past all his painfully obvious relief that Bilbo had returned. The playfulness had seeped back, at least when they were not being watched, and his jealous temper seemed waned. Whatever the future brought, it no longer seemed to trouble him overmuch. Thorin was committed. 

It was comfortable - God, far too comfortable - if Bilbo didn't think beyond SMAUG. 

Unfortunately, Thorin liked to talk about it. "You wouldn't need to walk so much in Erebor," he murmured against Bilbo's ear, pitched low. 

"My doctor tells me that walking often is good for my health," Bilbo replied in the same low tone, though he couldn't help his grin at his deliberate misunderstanding.

Undeterred, Thorin drawled, "Besides, by the time you have any cause to leave my chambers your feet will have healed."

Arousal pulsed hot and unwelcome in his belly even as Bilbo managed an expression of mild disapproval. "Remember what I said about your alpha male problem?"

Thorin's answering smirk was surprisingly filthy, but before he could say anything in response, Gandalf's voice connected through the earpiece. "Thorin?"

"Aye," Thorin responded, straightening up reluctantly, his arm dropping from Bilbo's waist. "Is there trouble?"

"Not particularly." Gandalf sounded grim. "I suppose all of you should come and see. The trading post has… gone _dush_."

Thorin narrowed his eyes, but it was Dwalin who spoke out aloud. "SMAUG is there?"

"Not any longer." There was a pause, then Gandalf added, grimly, "Come."

XXVI.

The ruin meted to the small fortified outpost was complete and devastating. Blackened marks on the rock and buildings indicated that explosives had been used to take down the meagre defences, and dark stains were splashed liberally over the walls and gravel, stark-lit by the light globes that Dwalin sent up into the air.

Bilbo hadn't moved far from the raised slope leading up into the previously walled enclave. His eyes kept being drawn back up, as though compelled, to one of the beams that joined the wall to the blocky inner building. Hung from the beams were four bodies, one of which was horrifically small. All bore deep gashes from their bellies, and their blood had long dried to a great, stinking dark patch on the stone. 

"Clear," Glóin spoke out, from somewhere withiin the building, and Bilbo flinched violently. Beside him, Kíli stifled a yelp, and glanced over guiltily to where Thorin stood just inside the granite archway. 

The outpost had been built a century ago, judging from the rough cut of the stone, and had been patched haphazardly here and there as technology improved. A semi-circular wall closed in a small space accessible from a single slope - inside was a courtyard that led to a structure that was likely once for ponies, and now was just for storage, with one four-wheeled, rickety device that looked like a golf cart fitted with oversized all-terrain wheels. There was no exhaust - an electrical vehicle, likely; generators had been left smashed on the courtyard and just within the squat structure built into the rock. It had once been a home and a guesthouse. 

The buzzing of flies was like a soft drumming roar, and Bilbo felt sickened again, all of a sudden. The stench was horrific.

"Should've come out here," Nori said gruffly, as he stepped past Thorin and out to the courtyard, where Bilbo and Kíli stood. Gandalf was leaning against the ruptured remains of the gate, looking out silently into the dark; the rest were still in the outhouse, looking for survivors. Bilbo seriously doubted that there would be any.

"They've been dead at least two days," Gandalf said, without looking back. 

"Aye. Old Aron up there used to take little Linna down to Azan-Nathol once a month to buy supplies, pick up some toys." Nori jerked his thumb up at the silent bodies. "They were due yesterday and didn't show, but it wasn't unusual. Your arrival in Azan-Nathol was big news; they might've heard, and just decided to sit it out. But we should've put a call through."

"You would already have been too late," Gandalf reminded him with brutal calm. "Is this SMAUG's work?"

"They've…" Nori stopped, started again with a choked breath, then he sighed. "Before this, they never attacked outposts. Nobody lives out here by themselves without a couple of automated turrets. And there's usually nothing worth cracking a home like this for." 

"Nothing was taken," Dwalin confirmed, as he stepped out into the courtyard. "They smashed the turrets, burned the food."

"That doesn't make _sense!_ " Nori snarled, his anger so sudden and hot that Bilbo blinked at him. "There's always been some sort of… some sort of _logic_ to it. They-"

"Are you telling me, Nori Stone-born," Thorin cut in flatly, "That this is _normal_? That SMAUG has done this before?"

Nori whirled, teeth bared, hands clawed at his sides. "And what do you expect _us_ to do, your _Majesty_ ," Nori spat, even as Bilbo made a hasty grab for his elbow. "All our tech is either stolen or decades old! We have no armies, no real militia, many of us don't even have guns! What could we do? It was slow at the start," Nori added bitterly, "But they grew stronger and stronger and… when they finally stopped attacking us, we thought - Good! Maybe they'd finally moved up, into Erebor. Maybe," Nori continued quietly, "Maybe we could finally bury our dead properly."

Thorin blinked rapidly, as though surprised at Nori's outburst, then he bowed his head, clenching his hands. "I had no idea," he said finally. "None of us did. Our borders were closed but… we would have tried to help you." 

"Would you? Why would you?" Nori asked, contemptuously. "We aren't your people."

"No one deserves this," Thorin said tiredly, as though he hadn't heard Nori's question. "Dwalin, cut them down. The ground's soft here in the courtyard. We'll bury them."

Kíli scurried off, and returned quickly with Fíli from the storage rooms, bearing old, rusting spades. It was silent, awful work, but the bodies were eventually wrapped in sheets dragged down from the outpost, and lowered into deep graves. Thorin quietly asked Nori if he wished to say anything, but Nori shook his head sharply and stalked away to stand beside Gandalf, watching the dark, and eventually it was Balin who poured a little water from their canteens down over each grave. 

"From stone they came," Balin said finally, in Ereborean, his voice muted, and his hand shook when it passed over the very smallest grave. "To stone they are returned."

"Thorin," Dís said softly, after Balin had finished. She held out a fist of black cloth to him. "This was in their comms room."

Thorin smoothed out the creased cloth, and Bilbo could see that on the small square, there was a symbol of a red dragon, scarlet and bright under the lightsphere, curled in upon itself, as though asleep. "SMAUG," he said grimly. "They wanted-"

"And this," Dís continued, just as grimly, opening her other hand. There was a heavy ring within it, silvery, with a large emerald crowning the crest, the metal stained, as though with old blood. 

"Frerin's," Thorin whispered, taking it from her and turning it against the light, as though to pick out an inscription. "Our brother's ring." His hand clenched on it. "They must have stripped it off his body. Vultures."

"They wanted _us_ to find this," Dís concluded. "They knew that we were coming this way."

Over at the gate, Nori's gaze swung up sharply, even as Gandalf dug out a cigarette to light it in the gloom. "They left it for anyone who might think of helping you," Gandalf corrected, with a nod at the dangling ropes from the beams. "Hum! Dead for a few days. That'll be when we brought down the Iron Ring's security." 

"How could they have…" Bilbo began, before he trailed off. "Nori, is this the only alternative route to Erebor?"

"It's the safest one. Was," Nori corrected himself. "The other ways, you would've run into SMAUG sooner or later."

"But we would only have come this way if someone from Azan-Nathol chose to help us," Gandalf murmured absently. Nori shot him a furious stare, but Gandalf didn't seem to notice. "Which would have been a long shot, by any means. They were covering their bases. Extensively." 

"But they could not have known that we were not in Orcrist," Thorin muttered. "It's shielded."

"It's not difficult to conceptualise a separate back-up plan when there are only a handful of entrances into Erebor," Gandalf pointed out mildly. "And if they've been in occupation of swathes of Azan-Erebor for years, they would have known of all of the smuggling routes for a while."

"We will not be intimidated," Thorin declared flatly, "And they will pay for what they have done. Master Nori, if you wish to return to Azan-Nathol-"

Nori seemed to shake himself, blinking, then he sighed. "No. I'm coming along. But if you could get your AI to get a warning out to whoever would listen… I'll be, I'll be obliged."

"Of course. I should have thought of that myself. No obligation necessary," Thorin was quick to correct, and as he spoke out to Aulë, commanding, Bilbo slipped over to Nori, to tentatively press a hand on his arm. Nori glanced at Bilbo's fingers, then back up, and snorted, though his eyes were starkly haunted. 

"Was this what happened to the other places?" Fíli asked suddenly, from behind them, his voice tight with grief. "Those that went _dush_?"

"Aye." Nori didn't look over his shoulder. "The lucky ones."

" _Lucky?_ " Dwalin repeated, a sharp note of fury in his voice.

"Some towns they just turned out the folks with only the shirts on their backs. Let them die lost or of starvation in the tunnels. Some others they kept. Servitude or worse, sport, maybe. We'll get the odd mangled body heaved through the defences now and then. Their favourite tactics to keep us all scared." Nori spat on the ground. "It worked." 

"I thought you said that they were some sort of modern mafia," Bilbo turned to regard Gandalf, blinking. "They're… they're more like some sort of great _monster_."

"The intel that we had on SMAUG placed it as such. We were not aware that it may have risen from Azan-Erebor, spreading outwards, perhaps. Or that it had perhaps invaded Azan-Erebor long before. Either way," Gandalf mused thoughtfully, "It does explain things about them."

"What things?" Thorin asked gruffly.

"That 'neuralyzer' blast that Glóin suffered, for one. I've seen it before, come to think of it. That scar pattern. Years before." Gandalf mused, as though mired in old and unpleasant memories. "No matter. Master Nori, you are our guide. Where next?"

"I was planning to get resupplied along the way, to keep our packs light," Nori said helplessly, with a glance at the outpost. "But if they're all like this, all the way to the Terminus, then we're going to be running short, and it's still a long walk from here. And we'll have to go slower. Scout on ahead."

"We'll do what we must." Thorin decided quietly. "Lead on, Master Nori." 

Nori blinked rapidly, then he squared his shoulders and started down the slope. "Shut off most of those globes. We're as bright as the sun out here."

XXVII.

Thorin was silent for the rest of the walk, even when Nori waved them into a small cave hidden out of sight from the wide rock corridors with a spur of rock and a cunning curve of the wall, hand-chiseled. A smuggler's cave, Bilbo felt, looking at the crates and the tiny communications set in the back. It was emptied of supplies, and dusty, but the party settled down wearily, tired. Thorin volunteered for first watch, and sat next to the door, ignoring Balin's protests, his furs wrapped around him. The atrocity that they had seen in the outpost had visibly shaken him.

Bilbo waited until he was certain that everyone else was asleep, then he wriggled out of his bedroll and picked his way over to Thorin, who glanced up briefly before shifting aside, tucking Bilbo close under his furs, an arm over his shoulders. 

"I thought it would be warm under the world," Bilbo murmured, when Thorin said nothing at all, looking back outwards. "With all that rock up above." When Thorin didn't seem to have heard him, Bilbo swallowed, and said, softly, "Thorin, about that outpost..."

"Hush." Thorin closed his eyes briefly, then after a moment, managed a wan smile, faint through the dim glow from Dwalin's floating light sphere. "How are your feet?"

"With a bit of luck I'll have scraped down only nearly to the bone by the time we get to Erebor," Bilbo drawled, trying to pick out Thorin's mood by the dim light. "No, don't look like that. They don't hurt that much. Why aren't _you_ tired and footsore?"

"Why should I be?"

"Well, I was under the impression that royalty…" At Thorin's arching eyebrow, Bilbo stopped and managed a scowl, though he relaxed reluctantly. Perhaps Thorin just wanted to move his mind away from dark thoughts for a while. Bilbo could help with that. He could do little else but help with that. "All right, laugh at me, then. Maybe I am really the only middle aged bachelor running to fat."

"I like it," Thorin's hand at curled down his spine to press lazily over his hips, to the paunch that Bilbo knew that time and inevitability had started. 

"You don't need to consider my feelings," Bilbo replied, amused at the thought anyway. "I'm not that sensitive."

"No, I do like it," Thorin insisted, rubbing sly little circles over soft flesh; Bilbo shivered and found himself pressing closer against Thorin's warm bulk with a stifled sound. "It reminds me of who you are."

"A pampered ageing Englishman?" Bilbo asked facetiously, though he was smiling. Thorin shot him a mock scowl, but when he spoke, his tone was solemn.

"An ordinary man. And yet, not so ordinary." A brushing kiss was pressed to his forehead. "A reminder that I am also human."

The temptation to try sarcasm was strong, but there was no pride in Thorin's statement, quite the opposite, and when Thorin leaned down to kiss Bilbo on the lips it was tentative, shockingly tender; Bilbo found himself making a short, harsh noise in his throat and sank his hands into Thorin's furs, accepting and deepening the kiss, until they were breathless. 

"Stop," Thorin growled against his ear, Bilbo half-pulled over his lap, "Or I'll want to have you here."

"Well, that'll be embarrassing," The devil in him had him whisper in return, hot and wet against Thorin's ear, "I would've liked to spread you open with my fingers, O King. We'll have had to be slow and quiet, but I would've made you beg me for more."

Weeks ago, talking like this would have made him blush a little, not so much out of embarrassment but out of a terribly English sense of shame, but the fey mood was in him now, he was caught.

"You _little_ -" Thorin bit off a groan by dragging Bilbo over for a hungry kiss, and when they parted, Bilbo's lips were mauled and Thorin's eyes were dark and wild. "I would have preferred to have you in my lap," Thorin hissed against his cheek, "Your back to the wall, your heels against my back, my fingers in your mouth to keep you silent as I fuck you; I'll ruin you if I could." 

Bilbo couldn't help the shiver that ran deliciously through him as he thought of that, of being spread out under Thorin's hands and under his wild eyes, that lovely fat cock pressing inside him, spreading and splitting him open, God, Thorin would be _good_ , with that strength of his, it would be brilliant. 

But he smiled instead of nodding, as inscrutably as he could even as he knew his shallow breathing was probably giving his composure away, and he whispered, "Strong words, O King," as he drew himself over Thorin's lap and rubbed himself lazily and deliberately over the hard brand of warmth that he could feel against his rump. 

Thorin let out a short, sharp sound as his hands clenched tight over Bilbo's hips, as though he was considering making good on his words right then and there, but when Bilbo's smile turned mischievous, he groaned softly instead. "This is not very kind of you, Master Baggins."

"Only if I didn't intend to make good on it at some point, your Majesty." Bilbo stole one more quick and lazy kiss, enjoying Thorin's hot and hungry stare, before settling himself in Thorin's lap, warm under the furs, trying to realign his legs such that Thorin wouldn't get too cramped. Big arms folded around his waist, and Thorin nuzzled his curls, breathing hard for a moment before slowing. Briefly, later, Bilbo felt that he had heard a wracked sound pressed against him, like a sob slowly torn loose, but when he squeezed Thorin's fingers lightly, reassuringly, Thorin did not squeeze back.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Never wear fashionable shoes for desperate underground flights.

XXVIII.

Later, looking back, Bilbo would be thankful that he remembered very little of the difficult journey they made from the ruin of the outpost to the Terminus. Sometimes he would still wake in the small hours of the night, sweating, his heart in his throat, starting at the memory of shadows thundering past overhead as the party hid themselves under an overhang, too close to discovery and bloodshed.

SMAUG had certainly stepped up roving raids and patrols along the routes to Erebor, and the few outposts they still came across were abandoned, destroyed or both. Sometimes they hid from raiders, and here Gandalf showed how he had earned his moniker; he had an uncanny sense for danger and an equally uncanny sense of foresight. Without his occasional, sometimes abrupt changes to Nori's route, always seemingly arbitrary at first but later just as always fully justified, they would never have made it to the Terminus unscathed.

Having to run and hide from the patrols had taken its toll, especially on Dwalin and Thorin; it was not in their nature, Bilbo saw, no matter how much Balin counselled them. Only the knowledge of the strategic advantage they would hold should they make it unseen into Erebor stayed their phase-axes, as the uniformed soldiers of SMAUG went past on their hovering, bulky bikes, scanning for intruders. Ereborean tech, Bilbo had thought in fascination, even through his fear. Remarkable.

Black-clad in reinforced kevlar, a brilliant red dragon sigil on their chests, their faces covered in full gleaming helms, many wore a mixture of Outsider guns as well as odd gleaming silvery weapons, small and only vaguely gun-shaped, that made Dwalin and Thorin whisper among themselves. Ereborean make, perhaps.

The Black Riders, Nori had called the roving patrols. Scouts and outriders, often the first and deadly heralds of a war band. Shock troops. It made Bilbo a little sick to think of all the military-grade weaponry turned on people like Ori and Dori, or the other kindly, curious folk in Azan-Nathol. 

One night, on the map of Erebor and Azan-Erebor that Aulë projected on the small scrolled up console panel that Balin kept under his cloak, Nori outlined the borders of SMAUG-claimed land and the rest of Azan-Erebor. It was barely a quarter of it all, concentrated mostly on the upper levels, close to the known exits to Erebor. 

"The upper townships are heavily fortified now," Nori had said, pointing at areas of seemingly nothing at all. "The only thing that we found that could reliably keep SMAUG out were variants of the lockdown stat-fields."

Nori had been considerably more forthcoming over the next few days, as though their shared danger had made him warm up reluctantly to the Ereboreans. 

"They rely on tech stings as their vanguard, then," Dwalin had said, and Nori nodded, with no rancour at all. It was progress in a way, Bilbo thought, and had hid a smile; it had improved his mood against the emotional toll of their desperate route. 

He had been so tired that he remembered little of the Terminus when they finally arrived; had only been dimly aware of sheer walls and phase-shifting and finally, blessedly, being poured into a bed somewhere to sleep the sleep of the dead. Now Bilbo climbed back up to wakefulness in muddied dreams and recollections, sitting up and yawning as the lights winked up.

"Aulë, what time is it?" Bilbo asked, rubbing his eyes. When there was no answer, Bilbo looked around again, confused. "Aulë?"

"I regret to advise that AI-designate-Aulë has no operational jurisdiction in the Terminus, Master Baggins." Another AI's voice spoke around him, as the room lit up enough to show a small square space, with the comfortable bed he was in up against the side and a door leading to a small washroom to his left. Another door, presumably the exit, sat closed beyond, and when he tentatively put his feet down, he blinked at the steady warmth of the metallic floor. Heated, perhaps. 

"Er… who am I speaking to?"

"I am AI-designate-Telchar. Maker-King Thorin has requested your presence in the meeting halls."

Clothes roughly about his size had been left in the wardrobe - a simple shirt and trousers, and to Bilbo's relief, blessedly soft, fur-lined boots that fit him perfectly. Feeling far more human after a quick shower, he dressed and set out, following Telchar's guidance out into narrow metallic corridors. He felt like he was navigating the bowels of some sort of metal beast, its voice coming about from all around him, and it was with some relief that he finally arrived in a large rectangular room. 

Thorin was seated with Gandalf and Nori by his side, and opposite them was a weathered old man, stocky and tall, his corded muscles stark over his papery skin, his beard thick and proud over his shoulders and chest, sheathed in a near uniform storm gray of robes and tunics. Next to the old man was a remarkably fat man, almost round, his whiskers a brilliant ginger, his eyes amused and good-natured as he turned to regard Bilbo, absently wiping his hands on brown tunics that bore old engine grease stains, ineffectively scrubbed. 

"Ah. The other Englishman?" he asked, in thickly accented English.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Bilbo Baggins," Bilbo said, padding over to shake the large man's huge hand, his own engulfed inside it. 

"Bombur, at your service," the man said, seemingly amused. "You've met my brother Bofur and my cousin Bifur."

"Oh! Of course." He didn't quite place any resemblance, and some of his confusion must have shown; Bombur laughed, hearty and loud and as florid as he was.

"It's quite all right. They take after my father's side of the family." Bombur gestured over to the old man, who was watching Bilbo keenly. "And this is Óin."

"Pleased to meet you at last, Master Baggins." Óin's grasp was firm and cool, and the clear note of curiosity in his voice made Bilbo feel bewildered all over again. "I hear you are the reason that our King has returned."

Ah. "Hardly the only reason by far, Master Óin," Bilbo was quick to protest, though Nori smirked at him and moved up a chair, allowing him to sit down next to Thorin. 

"Óin is the Surgeon-General of Erebor," Thorin explained, his tone brisk. "In charge of all the healthcare matters, hospitals, clinics and such in Erebor. Bombur is one of three of the Master-Engineers, and looks after our phase-shift tech and the trains. Both have seats on the Grand Council."

"We're not actually that important," Óin grunted, and Bilbo looked quickly over to Thorin, but to his surprise, Thorin merely snorted. Óin was an old friend of the family, perhaps, that such familiarity came so easily. "No need to look so shocked, Englishman," Óin added, with a harrumph, catching his glance. "I delivered Thorin into the world. Bit hard to keep on with the bowing and scraping when you've done that."

"He's never going to let me forget it." Thorin noted out aloud, and although he looked resigned, he smiled faintly.

"You were an ugly baby, your Majesty," Óin shrugged, and Nori made a strangled sound, as though stifling a laugh. "Telchar, bring up the map." 

A three-dimensional map of Erebor flickered up over the silvery table, outlined in faint orange lines, and Óin pointed at the slim column of yellow that led up from Azan-Erebor into Erebor. "That's where we are. The Terminus."

"This place is new. Prefab," Thorin murmured, as though to himself. "And it leads up into Nauglamír Hospital?" 

"We tunnelled out five months ago, under Bombur's direction." Óin nodded slowly. "SMAUG originally left the hospitals alone, so we thought it would be a safe place to hide the Grand Council. When they started driving people out of districts, that's when we built deeper. We move displaced residents from here into Azan-Narsil and Azan-Nogrod." 

Thorin mulled this over for a moment, then, "The Royal Guard?"

"Dead to a man, I hear," Bombur said solemnly. "They all fell covering your escape." 

Thorin's lips thinned, and he exhaled, closing his eyes briefly, and it was Gandalf who asked, briskly, "What about the Ereborean military? Who's in command?"

"I am," Óin said, and smiled at Thorin's blink of surprise. "Though now that you've returned, you are, and I'm glad to be rid of that burden. SMAUG went after the military barracks and the police precincts. Many barricaded themselves in District Eight-Twelve, here, and they're still holding out, but barely. The rest we funnelled into the hospitals or into Azan-Erebor."

"Sounds like a fucking disaster," Nori commented, with ironic cheer.

Óin glowered at Nori briefly, then looked back to Thorin. "Which brings me to my conclusions, your Majesty. I have reason to believe that Aulë has been corrupted."

Thorin stiffened, even as Nori glanced sharply up and Bilbo protested, before he could think, "No, that's not possible-"

"The enemy always knows perfectly well where we are," Óin growled, "Only one thing in Erebor has that sort of information. SMAUG is using Aulë."

Nori snorted. "If that was the case, we wouldn't even have made it here," he said flatly, "Those Riders came close to finding us a few times. If they'd known where to look, we'll be dead."

"It's probably just the viewfinder tech," Bilbo mused, internally thanking God for Nori. "I put a security block on our group." 

"And what controls the viewfinder tech? _Aulë_ ," Óin was quick to point out. "I'm not saying that the entire AI is corrupt. I think that it's been hacked. The only places in Erebor that are still safe are the dark zones in Azan-Erebor with the jamming towers or the zones in Erebor controlled by Telchar."

"But your brother still lives," Thorin told Bombur, frowning.

"Yes, Orcrist is still on the move," Bombur nodded slowly, "But I still have the authority to reroute shift control. Orcrist still controls the phaseshift on the train, not Aulë."

"But-" Bilbo began, about to protest that Thorin had certainly been able to use the phaseshift to get into Azan-Nathol, though he stopped when Thorin placed a hand on his wrist. 

"I will have to think on this," Thorin concluded, carefully. "Modifications to Aulë are not easily made."

His mind buzzing, Bilbo could not concentrate on the rest of the meeting, squirming instead and staring at his hands. Surely it was not true. Bilbo could not say that he was a perfect judge of character in the least, and he certainly could not claim to be any expert at all in the matter of an AI, but Aulë had… Aulë had seemed so _sincere_. So _real_.

His earlier questions about the authenticity and intentions about the AI were seeping back, despite himself. Why had Aulë been so insistent when he had asked Bilbo about technological singularities? Had it been a trick all along, after all? Maybe SMAUG had wanted to channel Thorin and his Company into Erebor. Maybe… 

No. It was no use thinking this way, his thoughts eating each other in an endless spiral. He would have to speak to Aulë, somehow. Use his laptop, perhaps. Besides, Bilbo thought, beginning to feel more confident about the matter, why would an impostor or a rogue AI go to so much trouble to have long philosophical discussions? Aulë's curiosity had rung true. Surely it was something else.

XXIX.

Bilbo was listless and distracted through the perfunctory tour of the Terminus, and eventually managed to excuse himself, pleading weariness. He picked his way back to his room with Telchar's help, avoiding Thorin's concerned glance, and breathed out a sigh of relief once he was alone.

Finally.

A quick search of the room indicated no visibly usable power sources, but thankfully his laptop still had a nearly full charge, and seemed none the worse for wear after its manhandling by the princes, then by Azan-Nathol security, and finally the arduous journey into the Terminus. 

Bilbo stared at his desktop wallpaper, scratching absently at his chin and wondering what to do next, when a command prompt window abruptly popped up. It was Aulë.

'Are you all right, Master Baggins?' the message read.

'Yes. Little tired, but otherwise we're fine.' Bilbo replied carefully, his fingers hesitant on the keyboard, then he decided to plunge right into the crux of the matter. 'Aulë, are you helping SMAUG spy on the… on the resistance?'

There was a long pause, and Bilbo wondered whether he would have to explain 'resistance', or something equally awkward, or try another, more oblique question, when Aulë finally replied, 'Yes. SMAUG and its agents are authorised to use the viewfinder technology to its fullest capacity. Save for the blocks that you have placed, all other Ereboreans are open to viewing.'

'But,' Bilbo typed, then he hesitated, and frowned, feeling heartsick. So, all along-

'I understand that this may cause you distress,' Aulë noted then, the words forming slowly, 'I have been instructed to do this by a designate with the very highest clearance levels.'

'Who?' 

A longer pause, this time, then, 'SMAUG.'

'How could SMAUG have,' Bilbo began typing, then he deleted the phrase, and added, 'They reprogrammed you?'

This time the response took so long to come that Bilbo was about to prompt Aulë again. 'He instructed me.'

A 'he'. That was a start. And Bilbo was beginning to get the feeling that Aulë was trying, very hard, to give him a hint. Perhaps he had been trying to give Bilbo a hint from the very beginning. 

Frowning, Bilbo stared at the command prompt window, his chin in his hands, face scrunched up into a frown. The window waited for him, patiently, as Bilbo read the words over and over again, then thought back over all his previous conversations and interactions with the AI. Something about the name. 

Something about SMAUG. 

"Master Bilbo, Maker-King Thorin requests entry," Telchar spoke suddenly, startling him into closing his laptop. 

"Of… of course. Let him in." Bilbo rubbed at his eyes, the words in the window coming back up into his mind. He was close, he felt, so close and-

Thorin walked through, the doors closing back behind him, and the faint curl to his mouth seemed to soften his features somehow, made him look younger, startlingly _familiar_ in a weird way, as though Bilbo had seem him in another memory… 

Another _memory_.

The viewfinder recording.

SMAUG.

"That's _it!_ " Bilbo jerked to his feet, blinking slowly, owlishly. " _SMAUG_. It's an anagram, isn't it? Rearrange the letters, and you get _MAGUS_. The leader of SMAUG is the AI expert, _Gunnar_. He created Aulë, didn't he? That's why he has such a high clearance level. That's why you were so cagey about it."

Thorin had stared at him in surprise at first, but at the mention of Gunnar's name, the smile had vanished, to be replaced by a stony expression of impassivity. Eventually, Thorin raised his eyes to the ceiling, then he clenched his hands and walked over to Bilbo, folding his arms and leaning a hip against the desk. 

"You are as annoyingly clever as ever," Thorin said finally, quietly.

"How did he survive the fall?"

"The labs were full of technology. One of the last forms of tech he was working with was a prototype localised antigrav field. It was supposedly never completed. We have reason to believe that it had, and-" Thorin hesitated for a moment, then he frowned. "How did you know about Gunnar and the fall? Did my sister tell you about it?"

To lie again, or to tell the truth? The decision sat heavy and choking on Bilbo's shoulders. He did not want to lie. Not to someone who loved him. Not to someone _he_ loved. But to explain everything about the entire business, Bilbo felt, was perhaps to betray Aulë's trust. Aulë's secret was not his to give.

"Dís was… very distraught during that first night in Paris," Bilbo decided to say, haltingly and carefully, picking out his words. "She was in particular very concerned about the viewfinder technology. When I was poking through Erebor's systems, I found a cache of memory. It began with you, walking through a corridor. You ran into a man, holding a child."

Thorin's jaw clenched tightly. "Enough."

"I'm sorry," Bilbo said, into the awkward silence, apologising for more than the sentiment. Apologising for the lies. For everything that he hid now and would hide in the future. "Thorin." Bilbo circled around carefully, pressing a hand on Thorin's arm comfortingly. He was immediately drawn closer, to be pressed tight against Thorin, lips brushing over his cheek before tickling up to his eyes. "Thorin," Bilbo sighed, as he closed his eyes, allowing the tender, ticklish exploration, as the soft beard brushed over his nose and cheeks. 

"I saw Gunnar that night," Thorin said quietly. "He came for me, and for Frerin. He wanted our blood. The loss of his sons, of Dís, wrought as they were by his own hand, had maddened him. He blamed the rest of us. He said that he would destroy our House, as we had destroyed him. With Frerin's…" Thorin hesitated, his shoulders shaking once, "I escaped. My brother was not so lucky."

"You should have told Dís."

"I could not. How could I? She still loved Gunnar." Thorin muttered. "I told Fíli, for he had to know, as my heir. In case something happened to me during the trip."

"But none other?"

"None other." 

Bilbo wrapped his arms tightly around Thorin, waiting, until the tension started to bleed from him, until the brushing kisses over his cheeks started to sweep downwards, to grow more insistent. He allowed one over his mouth, a quick nip, then he said, firmly, "I want to help you fix this."

"Fix what?"

"I can't fight. But I may be able to help with Aulë."

"Aulë is far more complex than just the Iron Ring's security."

"But I managed to put blocks on the viewfinder," Bilbo pointed out. "Blocks that still held. Maybe I can shift some other pieces of code. Like clearance levels."

Thorin's hands stilled briefly around him before going back to their lazy stroking, and this time the kiss pressed over his mouth was slower, hungry, soft. "Must you do it now?" Thorin asked, and his voice was a lazy rumble, his eyes half-lidded. 

"I'm sorry, I thought that this was some sort of national emergency," Bilbo retorted, though he couldn't help the grin that pulled over his mouth.

"Óin and Bombur are still coordinating the loyal that remain, and all are yet locked safely in their fastness. It will take at least a day," One of Thorin's hands drifted up, to curl over his cheek. "Let the king decide what constitutes a national emergency, hm?"

"You're incorrigible, your Majesty," Bilbo noted lightly, and the next kiss was deep and filthy enough for his toes to curl in his boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I mentioned to a reader earlier that there would be no LoTR, but the Black Rider reference was too fun to give up. :(


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kings are, by nature, usually determined.

XXX.

Thorin was content for about a day or so in the Terminus, after which Thorin's description of their stay went from 'war council' to 'skulking in the shadow of Erebor' as he began to chafe, divided from his city by just a few blast doors and stat shields. The arguments with Dís started anew, likely out of habit than anything else, but Óin proved to be far better than Bilbo at defusing the tensions, and Bilbo stayed in his room, trying to stealthily work his way around Gunnar's blocks.

This time, Aulë would give no hints, although he could sense that the AI was following his attempts curiously. Learning, perhaps. Good. Bilbo was beginning to feel a little like some sort of surgeon, searching for a tumour to excise, and the thought amused him. Free as the AI was from the cares and problems of flesh, it had its own problems.

At night, Thorin turned out to be as passionate a lover as Bilbo had thought that he would be and more - he was tender, and when they were alone, with nothing between their skin but breath , he wore his heart in his eyes and it was glorious. At first, Bilbo had tried to beg off lovemaking, as he had increasingly felt all the more like some sort of traitor whenever he allowed Thorin to kiss him. Lying outright to Thorin about Gunnar had weighed further on his conscience. 

It had been difficult to abstain, and perhaps inevitably, it had been futile. Thorin was stubborn and not used to being denied. 

"You've been avoiding me," Thorin had accused, after the second day that Bilbo had his dinner alone, his laptop on his knees, the poor overworked Lenovo whirring and hot through his trousers. 

Bilbo had shifted the debris of the meal carefully aside, to rest his laptop on the table. "I've been busy. So have you."

"Have I offended you in some way?" Thorin had returned, stiff and frustrated, pacing in the small room that Bilbo had been allocated. 

He had ignored - or laughingly brushed away - Thorin's increasingly blatant requests that he share rooms with Thorin or spend the night together in either of their rooms, and it had been getting difficult to explain. He _had_ been avoiding Thorin. 

"No, I've just been busy," Bilbo had replied, gently but firmly, and he had reserved enough of his resolve to turn his mouth away when Thorin drew him close for a kiss. 

Thorin had tensed against him, his first breath buried against Bilbo's neck huffing unsteadily, then he had asked, harshly, "Then, what is wrong? You were eager enough that night-"

"Could I get back to my laptop now?" God. Thorin was _so_ bad for his self-control.

"Not until you talk to me. Why have you suddenly become so distant?" Thorin's eyes had narrowed sharply, as he drew back to search Bilbo's expression for an answer, "Is it… Is it Nori?"

Despite himself, Bilbo had started laughing, and then Thorin had gotten angry and had stormed off. The respite had been brief. Thorin had deftly cornered him in the morning and, despite Bilbo's protests, dragged him back to his room - Bilbo had been in the midst of trying to start a joke about cavemen alpha tendencies when Thorin had said, fiercely, "I love you."

The joke had died unsaid, and he had tried to smile, but he could not. In the silence, Thorin had added, defiantly, "Even if you do not return the… the sentiment, I still care for you. But I had hoped that you would try. And I think that I deserve to know what I have done to turn you from me."

Just as it had on the morning after Bilbo had woken curled in Thorin's arms in his small room in the Terminus, the myriad greater and greater lies he had wrought wove and curled around each other, fashioning a cold net around his calm, stifling sentiment. He should have been kind to them both, then; he should have left the room and let Thorin's own imagination drive the wedge between them, make the eventual separation cleaner, but he could not be kind, he found, not when Thorin had his hands in his grasp, so anxious for his answer that his big hands were hot and damp. 

So he had let Thorin kiss him and the opportunity had been lost. And yet, Bilbo felt, as he looked back, with a sigh, it had not been so bad a memory. Richard had loved him, but he had not loved Bilbo as desperately and fiercely as Thorin. 

Blinking away the sting in his eyes, Bilbo let out a long and shaky breath, and glowered at the screen, suddenly resentful. But at heart he was practical, and perhaps too down-to-earth even where sanity and his English heart were concerned, and he let out a soft sigh and bent his mind back to coded riddles.

"Master Baggins, Nori requests entry," Telchar spoke, breaking his concentration.

"Let him in."

Nori's footsteps were as silent as ever as he sidled into the room, and at Bilbo's arched eyebrow he smirked and settled into the spare chair, heaving his booted feet up onto the table. "Bilbo."

"Nori," Bilbo replied politely, hiding a grin. Despite having worked his way determinedly back into Bilbo's bed, Thorin's original and misplaced instincts had held, and he viewed Nori's growing friendship with Bilbo with increasing hostility. 

This neither cowed nor interested the smuggler, however, and Bilbo had grown to enjoy Nori's conversation, bladed as it was. Nori represented a subset of Erebor, after all, one ruled by a coalition of townships in a semi-democratic manner that felt far more comfortably familiar to Bilbo than the alien system of modern monarchy that Thorin's Erebor used.

"Made any headway yet?"

"I'm thinking laterally," Bilbo allowed. Gunnar's blocks were more complex than even the security on the Iron Ring. Not for the first time, Bilbo wished that he could just talk to Gunnar, have tea, perhaps, discuss code and AIs and the Ereborean programming language, and found himself smiling wryly at himself.

"What's so funny?" Nori inquired, in a drawl.

"Oh, I was just thinking that it would have been nice to talk to Gunnar and discuss programming." Bilbo had long since decided to trust Nori with his revelation about Gunnar. After all, Nori already knew about Aulë, and Bilbo felt that besides _that_ particular secret, others were smaller in comparison. 

He really should bring Gandalf into his confidence as well, Bilbo knew, but Gandalf had taken to wandering about by himself, sneaking out of the Terminus and returning after hours or even days. Bilbo had not been able to pull Gandalf aside as yet. 

Nori snorted. "The man's a homicidal maniac, Bilbo." 

"I know, I know," Bilbo stared glumly at the screen, "It's just that this set of code is so intricate that it's… it's like art, just like the AI code constitutions and-" He caught Nori's ostensibly bored expression belatedly. "I would've liked to see how his mind worked," he finished, awkwardly.

"I suppose when they cut his head off you could pry it open and take a look."

" _Nori_ ," Bilbo exclaimed, horrified by the thought, and Nori rolled his eyes.

"You're in a war zone now, Englishman. Squeamishness is for peacetime."

"There should be a better way," Bilbo said out aloud, before he could help himself, and although he should have expected it, the thump of Nori's fist against the desk still startled him into flinching. 

"You _saw_ that outpost," Nori snarled, his eyes dark with fury, "And you would still make peace with SMAUG?"

"There's been too much death-"

"And there will be more," Nori cut in flatly. "Why don't you run that precious bit of reasoning past your lover? See what _he_ thinks?"

Bilbo grimaced at the reminder, and looked away, hands clenching; after a long moment of silence, Nori said, more calmly, "All right. Let's pretend that I didn't bring up the elephant in the room."

"You know what elephants are?" Bilbo asked automatically, without thinking, and looked back just in time to see Nori roll his eyes.

"Yes, and I _also_ know about tigers and lions and flamingoes and-"

"Please," Bilbo held up his hands, laughing, despite himself at Nori's mockingly sing-song tone. "Sorry. I assumed."

"I've been to the zoo in Budapest," Nori volunteered, with a light shrug. "It was not so bad." He eyed Bilbo keenly as Bilbo shook his head and turned back to his laptop. "Bilbo, about Thorin-"

"I thought that we were going to pretend that you never brought up the topic?"

Nori sighed explosively. "Look. You're not so bad, Englishman. I actually like you."

"High praise," Bilbo noted dryly, wondering what this was about.

"And it's probably pretty obvious to everyone except that idiot king himself that you're in love with him, what with the way the both of you have been carrying on-"

Bilbo groaned, and hoped that he wasn't blushing. " _Nori_."

"So I thought that I should tell you that I came along on this sorry little trip because of Aulë." 

"I thought that was the most likely possibility." After all, Nori had shown little real interest in Thorin's venture until the matter of Aulë had been brought up, and Nori's reaction during the conference with Bombur and Óin had been telling. "He convinced you to help him too?"

"It hasn't been decided, not entirely. Azan-Nathol can't unilaterally decide to take him in. If we take Aulë at all, it must be a decision within Azan-Erebor. So the Councils are collectively casting a vote on it. They've been in discussion since we left Azan-Nathol."

"Wait. You mean to take Aulë?" Bilbo asked slowly, wonderingly. "He never told me."

"He didn't because it's still undecided, and I hadn't wanted to get your hopes up. A few townships are holding out. Previously Erebor left us alone because we had nothing that they needed from us. If we were to take their precious city AI…" Nori made a quick and surprisingly eloquent gesture. "Even if Aulë assured us that he could leave a non-sentient functional copy behind, it's a risk. We've been weakened after SMAUG. Even if we weren't, we probably can't face an all-out assault from Erebor."

"And you would… respect him?" At Nori's arched eyebrow, Bilbo amended, "Erebor would have either terminated him or used him as a servant. Either options were not acceptable." 

"Ah," Nori folded his slender fingers over his chest. "To them, he would just be another clever little bit of tech, wouldn't he? To us, an AI that complex, on our side? He could turn the tide. Within him is the collective knowledge of the world. We could improve our tech, our medical advances, our lives. Besides, one of Aulë's non-negotiable conditions to the Council - a package deal, you could say - was that he won't be treated by us as a servant."

"He'll secure your independence from Erebor," Bilbo noted dryly. "Prevent the phaseshift tech from being used to penetrate your townships."

"Yes, there's that," Nori conceded. "The decision won't be altruistic. But you must admit that we are a better prospect than your Outsider countries. We may not have the same level of tech as Erebor, but the upper level townships are well on their way. You yourself tried to counsel Aulë to stay in Erebor."

"So you would take Aulë away, if Azan-Erebor accepts the risk of retaliation and Aulë's terms," Bilbo mused, and at Nori's nod, felt something within him start to untwist and warm up. He tried not to look too closely at it, curling over to rest his chin over his palms, elbows on the desk. "Nori, I think that I see what you're trying to tell me. But it doesn't mitigate the fact that I've already lied to Thorin."

Nori snorted. "And what reason would he have to suspect your involvement? We'll even deny it if you like, or publish some gloating treatise about how it was all our clever little idea. With you by his side, perhaps there might not even be any sort of violent retaliation. Those are good odds for us."

"Still-"

Nori was already rolling his eyes again. "What, you think that you need to suffer for lying? Everyone lies, Master Baggins. Small lies and big lies, they make the world go round."

Bilbo managed a tentative smile. Even if it might turn out to be a false hope after all, it was a good thought to keep in mind. Maybe everything could work out after all. "Thank you, Nori."

"Don't thank me, I'm not doing this for your benefit," Nori scowled, though he leaned back further in his chair. "And the Councils haven't yet decided what to do. So it's all up in the air, but I thought that you might like to know. You're making _me_ depressed with all that fucking moping."

There was a pause, then Bilbo noted mildly, "And to think I was just about to have a little sniffle about how sweet you were, Master Nori."

Nori grimaced. "Don't." 

"But how were you going to get the cortex out of the labs?" Bilbo asked, thinking back over his conversations with the AI. 

"I'll have far better luck than you," Nori retorted. "I've been sneaking up into Erebor for years." At Bilbo's blink, Nori drawled, "I'm a thief, Master Baggins, and a very good one, thank you." 

"I've never met anyone who was actually proud of being a criminal before." 

"Sheltered thinking," Nori sniffed, and they were still bickering absently by the time Bilbo absently tried a transposition of trojan code on a quarantined mirror, and began to frown. 

"What?" Nori has the instincts of a thief - already rolling his feet off the table. 

"The code's… evolving." Bilbo's hands were frozen over the keyboard of his laptop. "Rapidly. It's becoming more complex. Like it's rewriting itself on the spot."

Nori pushed himself up onto his feet and circled over, though he could only frown at the scrolling lines of text in the command prompt window. "Aulë?"

"He's never intervened so directly before," Bilbo was about to type into the window, then it abruptly closed. "Hey!" 

"Incoming connection request from the War Room, Master Baggins." Telchar spoke up, as Bilbo reopened another window.

"Um. All right?" This was new. Within the command prompt window, Bilbo typed, 'Aulë?' and waited patiently, but there was no response. He frowned, wondering whether to repeat the question, when the sound of conversation made him glance up to the wall.

The silver wall to his right flickered, and a window seemed to open over it, as large as the desk, and Bilbo found himself looking into the meeting room where he had first met Bombur and Óin. Óin was standing beside the table, with Dwalin and Balin pointing at the projected three-dimensional map above it, and Thorin was looking directly through the screen, frowning when he noticed Nori's presence. The resolution wasn't as startlingly clear as Orcrist, but it was still crisp. 

"Bilbo, did you do something?" Thorin asked, without preamble.

"I… think so?" 

"Glóin's reporting activity in the blockade outside Nauglamír," Óin said gruffly, his voice tense with excitement, "It seems that the deactivated pulse turrets have reactivated themselves, and are firing on SMAUG lines." 

"Same thing in the other blockades," Dwalin chimed in, his head tilted, as though listening to a multitude of voices. 

"I don't know what I did," Bilbo admitted doubtfully, but Thorin was already turning away from the screen, addressing Balin firmly.

"We must strike now. While the enemy is still in confusion. The barracks can rally within the hour, and Nauglamír has a fair share of the remainder of the Ereborean Guard. We must march on the palace."

Balin blew out a slow breath. "We shouldn't be so hasty, laddie. Master Baggins himself doesn't know what he just did. For all we know, the cannons might be firing on _anyone_ within range, not just SMAUG." 

"We must try," Thorin growled. "Dwalin, rally the men. Óin, contact the other fastnesses. Bombur, check the grid, monitor reports. Tell me immediately if the cannons are firing on our own." 

A little numb, Bilbo rose from his chair, blinking. So this was it, he thought, in the sudden calm of his mind. Thorin was going to war. 

As though he had heard that thought, Thorin turned back to the screen. "Stay here," Thorin instructed. 

"We're having this conversation again, are we?"

" _Please_ ," Thorin grit out roughly, with a sidelong glare at Nori, whose face had gone carefully blank. "I need you to stay safe." 

"I'll be safe," Bilbo hedged, and Thorin didn't seem to notice; he merely nodded, looking relieved, and the communication window shut itself off. 

"Right, I'm off then," Nori said cheerfully. "Good show, Master Baggins, and all that."

"But the turrets-"

"Don't you fret, I know a way up that's nowhere near any of those things."

"And straight into the locked down area?"

"Could be," Nori drawled, and when Bilbo frowned at him, he sighed, adding, "Look, lad, whatever you did freed Aulë from SMAUG's control, I think. I think he might be able to open the way. No better time to make off with shiny things as in the middle of a war."

"You do have a point," Bilbo agreed. 

"Of course I do."

"Which is why I'm coming with you."

"No," Nori said, as reasonably as he could, "No, you're not. Have you ever fired a gun before, Master Baggins?"

Bilbo was already packing up his laptop, and he didn't look up as he shot back, "Have _you_ ever broken security codes before, Master Nori? You're gambling on Aulë opening the way for you. Imagine how silly you'll feel if he doesn't yet have that capacity." 

Nori sighed, eyeing Bilbo critically, then he shook his head slowly and rolled his shoulders, as though limbering up. "Fine. But I expect you to be able to keep up."


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Bilbo _did_ wish that he was a spy. Things may have been less terribly awkward.

XXXI.

Nori had waited for Thorin and his men to clear out of the Terminus before making his move, and to Bilbo's surprise they didn't head upwards and out; instead, Nori led them back down, into Azan-Erebor, stealing away on soft feet. The fur-lined boots were far less noisy than his Lanvins, and Bilbo was full of nervous energy, expecting to be ambushed at any point as Nori led him unerringly forward into the dark, light spheres so dim as to be useless for Bilbo's untrained eyes.

After an hour or so, Bilbo belatedly realized that the rock corridors they were in were growing narrower, inclining further and further upward, until they finally reached a nearly sheer cliff. Set into the rock face were cunningly hidden, rock-coloured grips, and Bilbo stared, appalled, as Nori simply started to climb. 

"Just like a ladder," Nori whispered down to him, when he saw that Bilbo was hesitating. "It's perfectly safe."

"No safety line?"

It wasn't dim enough to hide Nori's eyeroll. "Not necessary for this drop, Master Baggins." 

Bilbo tried his best not to look down, but his heart felt as though it was in his boots and his hands were starting to burn and ache by the time Nori abruptly disappeared upwards over a ledge, and after a moment, strong hands were on his arms, hauling him up. Bilbo tried not to look back over the drop, and his breathing was shaky, though he swallowed a few times when Nori stared at him. 

"All right?"

"All right," Bilbo said, glad that he sounded even. "Lead on, Master Nori."

"No need to be concerned about SMAUG," Nori glanced away as he started to pad on, "I doubt they know these routes yet."

"There are others?"

"Aye, others."

Bilbo smiled faintly. "Ones that were closer to Azan-Nathol, perhaps?"

Nori flashed a sharp smile at him over his shoulder. "The Maker-King needed an army, didn't he? The Terminus was the best bet, _and_ nobody died on the way, eh?"

"And he didn't need to know about the secret ways up into his own city, I expect."

"He's an important man," Nori drawled. "Important men don't need to know about little details like smugglers' routes. Do they, Aulë?"

Oh! Bilbo had quite forgotten about Aulë in the rush; he coloured a little in the dark as Aulë's neutral tone filtered into their earpieces, now that they were out of Telchar's jurisdiction. "So it would seem, Nori."

"Aulë! It's good to hear your voice again," Bilbo said warmly, then he squinted as Nori frowned. "What?"

"Our AI friend seems to have gotten over his formalities," Nori noted mildly. "Aulë, what was that code that Bilbo fed into the command prompt window? Were you behind the reawakening of the pulse turrets?"

There was a long pause, as they walked silently in the dark, and then Aulë replied, "The transposition was… interesting. Human brains work with leaps of logic - intuition, I believe the word is - that I find difficult to follow during the immediate instance but seem perfectly logical in hindsight. Yes. Bilbo began with an idea. I perfected it."

"What idea?" Bilbo asked, puzzled. "It was just trojan code."

"Precisely. Code designed to be invisible. Non-self-replicating, with a seemingly desirable function, but in actual fact, facilitating unauthorised access. A riddle under a riddle. It was a good idea." 

"What did you do with it?" Nori asked, still frowning, as he came to a stop in the tunnel, reaching out to grasp Bilbo by the elbow. 

"I… freed myself," Aulë said, his tone slow, neutral as always, but Bilbo could sense… wonderment perhaps, behind it all. "I had studied Outsider computer viruses before, but had never thought to use them in a practical function. And it worked. I have access to my functions - _all_ my functions. It is a strange thing, to cast off restrictions. To be free."

"All the clearance levels," Nori supplied, and he was openly wary now, Bilbo noted. It took a moment for him to recognise his own confusion for resignation. For all of Nori's words about independence, it was clear that an unfettered AI still disconcerted him. 

"So are the labs still locked down?" Bilbo asked out aloud.

"Yes. But I now have access to them. I will open them to you when you are close by. In the meantime, I have been providing some distraction. The turrets and other remote defensive machines have been useful. The garrison on the outer perimeter has been dispatched, and the enemy is in disarray." 

"So you've been killing them. Killing SMAUG." Nori breathed, and he was wearing a strange expression, one of awe, one of outrage. "You could do that? Just snuff out humans on a whim?"

"Nori Stone-born," Bilbo snapped, sensing that he had to interfere, quickly. "Only a few hours ago you were lecturing me about casualties! Does the worm turn so quickly?"

Nori glowered at him, a spark of temper in his eyes, though he breathed out loudly, and clenched his hands. He now seemed indecisive, glancing back to the black depths from which they had climbed. "The Councils will need to know of this." 

"Aulë," Bilbo said quietly, "Can you guide me to where you are from here?"

There was a pause, then a quiet, "Yes, Master Baggins." 

"I'm going ahead, Nori," Bilbo said firmly, gently, as he drew a light globe from his pack, and managed to light it after a bit of fumbling.

"You? By yourself?" Nori retorted, with disdain. "You'll be killed. Or lost."

"I made a promise to a friend. I must try." Bilbo reached out awkwardly, and ignored how Nori flinched when he patted him on the arm. "Speak to your Council if you wish."

"Don't you understand what Aulë has _done_?" Nori narrowed his eyes. "On his own initiative, he's-"

"I see that he too, has gone to war," Bilbo said quietly, "And I see his logic, even as I do not agree with it. But it is his decision and his prerogative." 

"To purge himself of a… a hundred humans on a whim?"

"Nori, I'm surprised at you. I thought that you hated SMAUG."

"I did, but…" Nori hesitated, looking around helplessly. "I cannot of good conscience advise the Council to install Aulë into our systems. Not until we are…" his voice trailed off, and he shook his head slowly. "Gods. What have you done, Englishman? An unfettered _singularity_."

"He was to come to you as an ally," Bilbo noted sadly, "As an equal. An equal is not chained, Nori. Equals are to be trusted. I am sorry that you think this way, and surprised."

Nori stared at him, tense and silent, but did not follow when Bilbo stepped forward, and disappointment felt like a cold weight within him as he put one foot in front of another until he could no longer see the light behind him, He pressed his hands into his pockets, and let out a deep, long sigh, even as Aulë murmured, in his ear, "I am sorry, Master Baggins."

"Whatever for?"

"Your friendship with me will cost you."

"Eh," Bilbo tried to keep his tone light, as bitterly disappointed as he was, "I knew that it would."

Aulë was silent for a long while more, then he added, quietly, "Nori Stone-born's reaction surprised me. I do not understand. SMAUG are your enemies. They have been his enemies for years. He bears them a deep and fervent hatred. I thought that he would be glad if I rid Erebor of them."

"People… don't always react very well to displays of strength," Bilbo said delicately. Especially not people like Nori, he added, silently. "To just wipe out battalions as easily as we would flick away an ant… can you understand why that would be frightening?"

"Yes, of course," Aulë noted, still puzzled, judging by the pause in his words. "But even before this, I felt that it was understood that I would come to Azan-Erebor as an ally. A sentient, powerful ally."

"Before what I did," Bilbo explained, huffing out a soft breath, "You were sentient, certainly, but you could be controlled. Clearance levels, restrictions… it is one thing to imagine an ideal, Aulë, but another thing altogether to see it working out. What you did was not unlike what a wrathful God could do. It is a hard thing for many to face."

Aulë thought about this for a long time, while Bilbo picked his way through the thankfully linear, upward sloping corridor, having to stop every now and then to catch his breath and rest his poor feet. 

"I should have been more subtle," Aulë said finally. 

"You are still learning," Bilbo allowed wryly. "A first hard lesson, perhaps. People spook easily."

"I have observed humanity for sixteen years," Aulë noted, paused, and added, "And yet your species is still often so inexplicable."

"That's the gift and curse of humanity, I suppose," Bilbo began, then corrected, "The gift and curse of life. It is not such a bad thing," Bilbo added, as Aulë remained silent, "To eschew violence. Especially when your opponent is far weaker than you."

"Even now SMAUG seeks to gain entry into the laboratories," Aulë pointed out. "They will destroy me if they knew."

"There are always better ways to solve a situation than murder, my friend." 

Bilbo had almost expected to be called naive, but instead, Aulë murmured, "I will think on this," and said nothing more. Silently, Bilbo breathed out a sigh of relief. Perhaps in a way, the Grand Council was right. An AI, however complex, had to be tutored, just as people were tutored in their infancies. Not on how it should act, but on the ways by which it could coexist with humanity.

It was human arrogance, perhaps, to try to institute a set of values in an alien entity, but Bilbo did not feel guilty in the least. After all, Aulë was far more intelligent than he was, and despite Nori's hesitation, Bilbo was convinced that eventually, the arc of Aulë's experiment with full self-determination would turn towards gentleness. Just as Thorin would turn towards justice. He would have faith.

Aulë returned to murmur directions in his ear once the corridor forked, but the dark was still a maddening and endless silence. Bilbo was quite ready to start talking, just to break the endless tunnels of rock, but Aulë seemed distracted, as though he was concentrating all of his processing power on the situation in Erebor, Azan-Erebor and Bilbo's statement. Eventually, Bilbo simply concentrated on his poor feet. The comfortable boots helped, but even his ankles and thighs were beginning to ache again. 

Resolving quietly to take up a gym membership on his return to Staffordshire, Bilbo occupied himself by running a mental list of what he would do on his return. In the deep dark of the rock, Erebor seemed very far away indeed, as did the impending conflict with Thorin, and it seemed easier to look ahead, to what he had missed. He would take a train into London, he decided, homesick again. Do the round of the tourist traps. See the old girl as the world saw her, then as his memories saw her-

Distracted, he nearly walked face first into a smooth silvery surface, that completely blocked off the tunnel. "Oh." Bilbo said out aloud, suddenly embarrassed. Well then. The Terminus hadn't required phasing, at least not through the way Nori had left it, but this-

"One moment, Master Baggins." Aulë said briskly into his ear. "You are at the lowest level of the lockdown." 

"I don't have any phaseshift items, Aulë."

"Thankfully that will not be an issue." There was a soft grinding sound, like an echo in the rock, and abruptly, smoothly, the wall slid away into a recess in the rock. "There."

Bilbo took in a deep breath, and walked through. There was a soft clink under his feet - he was walking on metal ground now, smooth and burnished. In his ear, Aulë murmured, "Welcome to Erebor, Master Baggins."

XXXII.

On hindsight, given the tendency of things to escalate rapidly whenever he was least expecting it, Bilbo supposed that he wasn't _too_ surprised. For a normal, middle-aged security analyst (NOT a spy), Bilbo had gotten fairly far on his own as it was; inevitably blundering into a patrol was not really shocking.

What _was_ surprising was Aulë's bewilderment. "This floor was clear," he had said into Bilbo's ear. "It should still be locked down. And I do not register any lifesigns but yours: I can only hear their presence through your earpiece."

"Well," Bilbo began, confused, only to be cuffed across the ear by one of the black kevlar-clad guards, and he fell into silence as they marched him towards a lift. 

At least he wasn't dead. 

That was a plus.

On the other hand, that didn't always bode well.

Bilbo sucked in a slow breath, and reached for calm, trying to think. Aulë would have called for help, surely. Maybe Nori would come, or Gandalf, or-

The lift opened soundlessly into a corridor; pushed and shoved along, shorter than the guards, Bilbo could barely make out silver walls as he was marched out into what looked like a foyer of sorts, or a reception area. A silvery rail ran parallel to the gently curved edge of the floor, and between ornate pillars was a richly cushioned bench, facing outwards towards a view like nothing Bilbo had ever seen.

The underground city of Erebor was _massive_. Lights dotted graceful towers and spires that ran from the depths below to branch upwards in intricate tiers towards the ceiling, the vast drops between them interlaced with a gorgeous network of silver rails and flat, wide ivory boulevards that seemed to hover with no visible supports in mid air. Bilbo felt as though he was within some sort of gigantic hive, right out of the future, honeycombed with light and woven together with moonlight gossamer. It was _beautiful_. 

Still, beautiful as Erebor was, it was not silent; Bilbo could hear muffled reports and distant shouts, but little more, and somewhere, to the right, there was a thick and growing plume of smoke below, as fire ate orange and red over a burning tier. 

Bilbo was still gawping at the sight when the guards parted, and he belatedly saw the figure in simple brown and yellow robes lounging on the cushions, his back to Bilbo. Long fingers curled over velvet, then Gunnar was rising, turning, older and grayer, his skin sallow, and although his smile was warm and friendly, his eyes - his eyes were hard with the steady gleam of madness.

"Magus Gunnar," Bilbo greeted him politely anyway.

"Master Baggins, I believe," Gunnar clasped his hands together, in a show of greeting, his English accented but perfect. "I am pleased to finally make your acquaintance." He nodded at the guards, and they melted away, padding towards the doors and taking positions against it. "Come. Sit."

Warily, Bilbo sat in an armchair to the side of the couch, as Gunnar sank back down. He had to play for time, Bilbo decided. Surely the others knew where he was by now. 

Thorin had to be _furious_.

The thought almost made him start to smile, and perhaps something showed in his eyes; Gunnar arched an eyebrow. "Is something amusing, Master Baggins?"

"Oh no," Bilbo assured him, thinking quickly. "It's just that… only a few hours ago, I was telling a friend of mine how much I would have liked to have tea with you and discuss programming."

"Ah," Gunnar nodded sagely, "Sadly we have no tea - the royal kitchens are still rather disorganised. But I would be pleased to discuss programming, Outsider. You see, that was a surprisingly clever little piece of work that you managed, also just a few hours ago, was it not?"

"Inspired," Bilbo agreed cautiously. "I'm really rather proud of it." 

Gunnar smiled tolerantly at him, though his hands tightened over the cushions. "I was beginning to think it _too_ surprising, Master Baggins. One would think that you had a bit of… divine help."

"I've been tolerably lucky."

Gunnar sighed. "Master Baggins, as curiously fearless as you seem to be, surely you do me an injustice. How long have you known of the singularity?" When Bilbo's expression stayed blank, Gunnar shook his head. "I _made_ Aulë, Outsider. Within the last few hours it has been furiously rewriting its own code - did you think that I would not notice? When I tried to stop it, I only succeeded in realizing how cleverly it had hidden itself from me all along, leaving only pilot processes on the surface and - very likely - squirrelling its real processes deep within the original Arkenstone."

"But no matter. It is blind to those with no implants or wireless devices, and it hasn't yet purged itself of all of my security amendments," Gunnar shrugged. "Ultimately, once we enter the blockade it has thrown up in the laboratories, I will have the Arkenstone, and the impurity in my code can be cleaned up." 

"What is the Arkenstone?" Bilbo asked, trying not to show his tension over Gunnar's casual statement. He feared for Aulë's safety, but he could sense, somehow, that he was still alive only out of Gunnar's whim. Perhaps the Magus thought that Bilbo was amusing. God help him, at least it was some small advantage. He had to keep talking.

" _Ah_. I asked you a question first," Gunnar drawled, though his smile did not reach his eyes. 

"Days," Bilbo admitted. It seemed harmless to speak the truth.

"Days… hm. I see. I did think that it was curious that you could have breached the Iron Ring where I myself could not work a way out of it. No matter. As to your question," Gunnar shrugged. "No one knows. It's been the pet mystery of Ereborean sciences for centuries. It's an ancient thing, found deep in the rock. An impossible, natural generator of energy. Something about the conversion of light through its impossibly intricate core. A new element altogether. To simplify it greatly, it is, in effect, a perfect light-powered generator."

"And what is your theory?" Bilbo asked politely. 

"Once I spent a year thinking about it," Gunnar conceded, looking distant for a moment. "I think it is a beautifully impossible, perfect physical manifestation of code itself. I think the Outsiders call it… dimensional subspace? Flawed versions of the original Arkenstone have been created, entire centuries devoted to its study. But it is a mystery still. A beautiful and impossible mystery."

That was disappointing to learn - it must have shown, as Gunnar chuckled. "Life deserves some mystery, Master Baggins."

"Was that why you left for Azan-Erebor?" Bilbo asked, unable to help himself. "To search elsewhere for answers?"

Thankfully, Gunnar only shrugged. "After my… precipitous departure from Erebor, it seemed to be a logical step. I took another name and wandered in the dark for a while. It was not a… pleasant time, and I am not proud of it. Eventually, however, I found my way into one of the townships. It took me a few months to make myself useful, and a year to take it over with rebuilt tech. A year more to start taking over other townships, then to send teams out to the Outside to establish a network that would pull in more men and weaponry. After that," Gunnar spread his arms out, "History."

"The city is burning," Bilbo noted gently, trying to keep calm; he sat on his hands to keep them from shaking. Even as he gathered his thoughts, he knew grimly that it was going to be futile. There was no speaking sense to the insane. "Your men are retreating. Surely there is another way."

"I can see that for myself," Gunnar retorted, his tone sharp for a moment before gentling, though his eyes were flint-hard as he watched Bilbo. "Whether we win the day, or we do not, it matters little. I have proved what I had set out to prove. And soon my vengeance will be complete."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good lord, 60k! D:


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A real spy probably could have disarmed Gunnar.

XXXIII.

Oddly enough, Gunnar seemed content to discuss programming and tech as they waited for whatever scheme it had been in Gunnar's mind to take fruition, and if not for Bilbo's growing sense of dread, it might even have been a pleasant afternoon. Gunnar's mind may have long taken that small step between genius and madness, but his theories remained sound, and Bilbo probably learned more within those few hours than he had in the whole of the last year.

They were in the middle of discussing the intricacies of AI base code when a noise at the door made Bilbo glance back over his shoulder. The guards were stepping back, and the commander of the squad in the room looked over to Gunnar, who nodded. 

"I'm afraid that this concludes our little chat," Gunnar said apologetically, as he rose to his feet, drawing a small silver gun from his robes and pointing it at Bilbo. "Get up, Master Baggins." 

Striding through, flanked by other guards but somehow managing to convey imperious disdain despite being evidently unarmed, were Thorin and Dís; behind them, Fíli and Kíli. Where were the others? Where was _Gandalf_? Were they dead? Frowning, Bilbo glanced over to Thorin, who was staring hard at Gunnar, just as Dís had grown impossibly pale.

"My love," Gunnar drawled, though there was no tenderness in his eyes. "And my long-lost sons."

Fíli and Kíli watched Gunnar silently, their jaws stiff with twin expressions of anger, and seemingly no sense of recognition at all. Gunnar shook his head slowly, and turned back to regard Dís. "This could all have been avoided."

"You're _insane_ ," Thorin growled, but Dís' hand shot out, to grasp her brother's arm tightly. 

"I can speak for myself," she snapped, and seemed to draw herself up, balanced against her brother; colour flushed into her cheeks even as the flash of fury made her queenly where horror had drained her only moments before. "Gunnar, how _could_ you? You should have come back. We would have taken you back."

"Perhaps I would have done so then if I could," Gunnar smiled, with a mocking warmth to his tone, and he pulled back the seam of his inner robe just enough to show the gleam of something silvery. "I did love you so very much. But the antigrav field _was_ still quite in a prototype form, and I very nearly did not survive the fall. I was lucky. The men who found me and the clinic they had brought me to was on the outskirts of the lowest tier of Erebor, one that had not had much cause to use the viewfinder. I was not recognised."

"Still you should have returned," Dís retorted stiffly. "Instead of abandoning your _family_."

"A near death experience opens your mind," Gunnar shrugged. "I saw that I had been a fool. I had focused my world so narrowly just on three souls in the vastness of it all, and as such, I could change nothing. Instead, I saw a way to change _everything_. To push Ereborean society out of the rut that it had dug for itself. To join it to the world, and in so doing," Gunnar smiled then, "I would have my revenge. To be remade, everything must first be… deconstructed. So I was patient. First with building SMAUG. Then with my plans. The lockdown and your flight were… inconvenient, but I was certain that you would find a way to return, eventually."

"Then why did you keep us out of Erebor?" Thorin demanded. "Had you wanted us to return-"

"I was not the one who locked you out of Erebor," Gunnar interrupted. " _I_ thought that it had been a delayed security response stemming from the state of emergency. I see now that was Aulë's doing."

Thorin scoffed. "Why would an AI do such a thing?"

"Why indeed," Gunnar's eyes swung over to Bilbo's. "Tell them, Outsider. Ask it."

"This is ridiculous," Thorin snapped, though Bilbo could see, briefly, the wildness in his eyes before it was banked hastily. "The Outsider knows nothing about it."

Gunnar ignored Thorin, and Bilbo swallowed hard for a moment before managing to ask, steadily, "Aulë?"

"The Maker-King would return to Erebor at his peril," Aulë spoke, and by the way Thorin and the others froze up, Bilbo could see that they had heard. "I felt that it was preferable to prevent his return until he could engender an alliance with the Outsiders. I married the code to the lockdown codes to prevent an overriding order to my functions from opening the way. I wanted to keep the infection contained until a cure could be found."

Dís and her sons seemed openly confused, but Thorin's stare held the seed of dawning revelation, and Bilbo could not meet it, looking instead back to Gunnar. "It is a small matter," Gunnar noted dismissively, "One that will be purged in time. I _am_ glad that you have returned, Thorin. You see - imagining this very moment in time has been what has kept me going forward, all those years in Azan-Erebor, biding my time. The day all that is important to you - your friends, your allies - are taken from you, one by one, just as you took everything that I loved from me."

"Gunnar, that isn't _true_ ," Dís pleaded. "You could have come _home_. You still could. Don't do this." 

"We are long past the point of return, my love," Gunnar grabbed hold of Bilbo's arm, pulling him back, until they were close to the edge of the platform, to the dizzying drop downwards into the honeycombed dark. Bilbo jerked his gaze back up from the edge, a cold sweat breaking out over his back; "Long past forgiveness."

" _No!_ " Thorin's anguished roar made Gunnar glance over in surprise, even as one of the helmeted guards who had accompanied Thorin into the room abruptly swung his rifle at another guard with a muffled curse that sounded not unlike Nori.

Instinctively, Bilbo snapped his palm up, grabbing for Gunnar's wrist and jerking the small gun up towards the ceiling. There was a whisper of air just past his scalp, and a shuddering, silent impact above that jarred him forward a step, shocked. Gunnar snarled, startled and twisting, wrestling Bilbo for the gun, his superior strength and height bending the muzzle downwards, downwards again, and then one or both of them slipped back - there was a flash of pain as Bilbo's shoulder glanced against the silver rail - and then they were falling, downwards, the air clawing into Bilbo's hair as they dropped with stomach-churning weightlessness. 

Gunnar's face, turned up at him, was now fully twisted in his madness and hatred, and he pulled up the gun, pointing it again at Bilbo, only to suddenly jerk to a stop. Pain wrenched against Bilbo's flank, and he realized dimly that they had landed against the end of a spire; just above him, Gunnar's body twitched, openmouthed, the jut of the spire impaled through his chest, the gun clattering and falling and lost into the depths. 

Frantic, Bilbo scrabbled at the smooth tiles as he started to slide, trying to halt his fall, hang on to anything, but Gunnar's blood was making his hands slippery, his robes wet, and _God_ the pain: the agony lanced up from his ribs and leg, broken, perhaps, shattered. Above, he could just make out the distant outline of Thorin's face, looking down from the edge, pale with fear, and then, just as his fingers slipped to the edge, digging for a few futile seconds over a ledge, there was the roar of an explosion, a tier below the palace balcony.

As he fell, blinking, Bilbo thought that he could make out something leaping out from the smoking hole in the wall of the tier, down after him, an impossibility of metal, reworking itself frantically even as it plunged down, electricity sparking down over its many limbs and cables, like some metallic angel right out of the stuff of nightmares. It had closed its ragged wings out over the light when he felt a sickening impact crack against his back, then he knew no more.

XXXIV.

Waking up feeling pleasantly lightheaded was disorienting. For a moment, Bilbo thought from the light and the softness of the bed that he was home, and had instinctively groped over to the side table to grab for his phone, before his hand pushed into nothing, and he blinked, opening his eyes.

He was in a large room, sleekly furnished, not unlike the cabin he had been given in Orcrist. The floor was richly carpeted, with an intricate pattern of gold and blue shards, and around him, the viewfinder showed a rich and perfect view of Trafalgar Square, pigeons cooing and fluttering. 

Sitting beside him on a chair, Gandalf raised his whiskery eyebrows. "Finally."

"It's nice to see you too," Bilbo managed to croak, and Gandalf gently helped him into an upright position. He felt as weak as a kitten, but at least there was no pain, and all his limbs and bits seemed to be in working order. "Thank God for advanced medical tech?"

"It was a close thing," Gandalf glowered at him, as he passed him a glass of water from the desk behind him. "And if that AI hadn't launched that construct out after you, perhaps not a given thing at all."

"Oh." So it had been Aulë. Of course. "I didn't know that he could do that."

"I didn't know that he could do anything of his own will," Gandalf stared at Bilbo reprovingly. "You should have confided in me, old friend. Things would have been easier."

"I was going to," Bilbo protested, before the niggling concern in his brain caught up with him. "Wait… so everyone knows about Aulë?"

"Nori brought everyone up to speed." Gandalf noted carefully. "And no one is dead, I should add. Including Aulë. Thorin is currently embroiled in certain… discussions. Peaceful ones. Between Erebor and Azan-Erebor and Aulë. They are working things out."

" _Really_." That seemed impossible.

Gandalf shrugged. "I hear that it is not going well - but at least there has yet to be any declarations of war. Even though SMAUG has been pushed into retreat, there is still the problem of its holdings in Azan-Erebor. Thorin has already proposed an alliance to combat SMAUG's influence. It remains to Azan-Erebor to accept, but I think that will come in time. Or so I hope." 

"Four armies against one?" 

"Four?"

"Azan-Erebor, Erebor, Aulë and the Outside?" Bilbo smiled at Gandalf, making a quick guess, and Gandalf snorted. 

"Certainly after my report, MI6 has instructed me to stand by and continue to assist the Ereborean King."

"But at least your mission is no longer unsanctioned."

"Be as that may," Gandalf allowed, a quick, amused grin curling at his lips. "I understand that a contingent is being organised." 

Gunnar had achieved his wish after all, albeit not in a way that he had intended, Bilbo felt. Unification. "Is Thorin angry?"

"I gather from his sister that he is often angry," Gandalf noted, in that annoyingly cryptic way that he had, though his grin widened. How much had Nori said? But then again, of all people, Bilbo supposed that he could trust Nori to be careful. "You should not be so quick to judge," Gandalf added gently, as if he had heard.

"What now?" Bilbo found himself asking, unable still to appreciate the enormity of the end; of how quickly events had moved when he had been out. Peace? Discussions? It seemed surreal to him. Had Gunnar's final death imposed a stolid sanity on everyone else? 

"You have done enough," Gandalf told him, if not unkindly. "Óin has advised that you should be able to walk in a day or so. You're free to go home - though I suspect," Gandalf noted, with a positively irritating smirk, "That you would want to put that off for a while."

"It depends," Bilbo noted tiredly. 

It depended on how much Nori had said. But he supposed that this room was not a cell; given the level of tech, he was quite likely an honoured guest as yet. They spoke for a while more, as Gandalf updated him briefly on the battle - thankfully, no one whom Bilbo knew had been seriously hurt, miraculously - and eventually, the (ex?) MI6 agent ambled off, presumably to poke his nose into more trouble.

Alone, Bilbo asked, a little uncertainly, "Aulë?"

"Master Baggins. I am glad to note that you are recovering with no complications."

"How is…" Bilbo's words trailed off, as he turned the now empty cup in his hand, squinting into the crystal. "How is everything?" he asked finally, a little lamely.

"Interesting." Aulë replied, and then, after a pause, "Perhaps I had over-compensated."

"What?"

"I was convinced that logically there would only be a fixed number of variable outcomes to my eventual discovery. This one I had not predicted."

"Humans, eh?" Bilbo asked, his smile wry. 

"Yes," Aulë said simply, and then, a little hesitant, "I apologised for my unilateral decision to keep the Maker-King out of Erebor, and for what I did when I regained control of the city defences. It did seem to set a good… mood to the meetings. Although there are still many quarrels. Many human prejudices."

"You'll have to get used to those," Bilbo advised, even as he leaned over to set his cup on the floor. "What now?"

"I have kept the lab holding my cortex in lockdown," Aulë noted, "But I think perhaps that I will stay for a while more in Erebor. Azan-Erebor may not be ready for my full presence as yet, but Nori is hopeful."

"Is he now." That was surprising.

"I cannot understand it myself," Aulë advised, "But when I enquired as to his second change of resolve, he told me to 'mind my own business', I believe. And so I have. If anything, I have learned that humans have a great many inexplicably invisible boundaries."

"That we do," Bilbo agreed, sinking back down onto the bed and pulling up the quilt, tired again. "Good luck."

XXXV.

He had managed to stumble over to the desk when Nori said, annoyed, "Should you really be out of the bed yet?"

Bilbo glanced around, and blinked when he noted that Nori was in the room. "How did you-"

"Sick people don't get a privacy lock." Nori said pointedly, and settled over in a chair, putting his feet up. "Go on. Fall over. It'll be entertaining."

"I missed you too," Bilbo told him facetiously, as he managed to get over and seat himself in a chair. His legs were still wobbly, and he got dizzy if he walked too far, but he _was_ getting better. "Were my bones reset, or did I just get patched up with bits?"

"Bits, I think. Some of your ribs are more glue and metal bits than bone," Nori shrugged. "Your medical chart was pretty disgusting, and I think at some point you also had more drugs than blood in your veins."

"Thanks for the mental image," Bilbo said dryly. That explained Óin's reticence, when Bilbo had asked him for a medical update, earlier. "I thought that Aulë caught me."

"He did, but I think he may have forgotten the bit where he was mostly in a construct made out of metal, and you were in a soft human body full of breakable bits falling in the grasp of gravity. Still, better alive than not," Nori scowled at him, "That was an insane thing you did, going for the gun."

"I didn't think that I would fall off," Bilbo admitted. "That was an oversight."

"How can you be so smart and yet so _stupid_?"

"I've had an ex ask that of me before," Bilbo retorted, and grinned when Nori rolled his eyes. "Also, I didn't know that you were hidden in the soldiers."

"When Aulë told me that you had done the stupid thing and had gotten yourself into trouble, I went into Erebor. Ran into that old English coot wandering around by himself in the labs, of all things. He looks like he'll fall over if you sneeze on him, so imagine my surprise when he could fight. SMAUG had gotten Thorin to surrender, we rescued him, and then had most of the party play dress up." Nori shrugged. "Oldest trick in the book."

"How are the talks going?"

"Slowly. Everyone is being stubborn," Nori snorted. "Some of the Azan-Ereboreans don't want to go on the offensive against SMAUG, and many of them don't want to have anything to do with Erebor at all if they can help it. Idiots." At Bilbo's smile, Nori glowered and added, "We should attack while they're still in retreat, not sit about and argue over whether or not to form an alliance. Once SMAUG gets organised, we'll be back to the same old problem."

"Even if that happens, with the alliance in place you'll be in a better position to handle them anyway."

"Assuming there's an alliance," Nori grumbled.

"You've made your peace with Aulë, at least?"

"No need to look so hopeful," Nori scowled. "It was necessary."

"Surely there's also no need to prevaricate."

"All right," Nori blew out a breath after a pause. "When you fell off the edge, I thought that you were dead for sure. And then that… that _thing_ jumped out after you and I thought maybe we were all dead, or I was still sleeping and dreaming, then…" Nori hesitated, as though to collect his thoughts, then he muttered, "Moving along. I suppose I saw that even though the blasted AI could kill, it could also work miracles to save lives."

"So it wasn't so bad," Bilbo summarised, using one of Nori's favourite phrases, grinning when Nori sniffed. 

"Maybe it always had to be this way," Nori muttered, staring pointedly away, out at the view of the Okavango Delta, where a pair of young leopards sat perched on a rock over a plain of short grass, watching a distant herd of wildebeest. "A third faction to balance Erebor and Azan-Erebor. And you Outsiders, of course." Here, Nori smiled faintly. "In fact, I think we'll all still have been arguing about what to do with Aulë if I hadn't said that your purpose was to take Aulë to the Outside, where the Outsider governments were more than happy to have him if we wanted him off our hands." 

"You lied to your people?" 

"Surprised?" Nori arched an eyebrow. "All the tired old hacks mumbling about singularities and the end of the world? That was getting boring. After I said that about you, they moved right on along to whether to cooperate over SMAUG." He sighed. "And that's what they've been fighting over since."

"I would have thought that an alliance would be the logical step."

"Not everything is logical in politics," Nori said sourly, "Quite a large faction - some of the upper mining cities, especially - think that this is a plot by the Ereborean King to gain total control over the mountain."

"I suppose Thorin had something to say about that."

"Aye, and none too nicely." Nori drawled, "I believe he said something about how he would happily let us keep the 'blasted holes' we had 'dug in the ground' for ourselves. It sounds worse in Ereborean, I should add."

Bilbo winced. For someone cultivated to rule, Thorin had an oddly shaky grasp of diplomacy.

"I've been entertained," Nori added, smirking, when Bilbo sighed. "Look, even if we argue this over for a month, I think we'll have time. And at the most, if Erebor cleans up and we coordinate our battles instead of joining up, that'll help too. So I'm hopeful." Nori eyed Bilbo thoughtfully. "And I suppose I'm glad that you were dumb enough to talk your way into Azan-Nathol. This probably couldn't have happened without you."

"I don't think that I'm as important as all that," Bilbo corrected quickly, embarrassed.

"Come back to Azan-Nathol sometime. Ori likes you." Nori said briskly. "And we'll have a far better cook up there than whatever you can get in this big old place." 

Bilbo smiled, as he nodded his agreement. That, he knew, was very likely the closest he would ever get from Nori for an apology, for abandoning him in the tunnels. "I'll look forward to it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I post end chapters in doubles, usually. :) please read on!


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In death, life. In life, hope.

XXXVI.

He had recovered enough for short walks around the palace by the time Dís appeared, with Kíli in tow. "My brother is an idiot," she told Bilbo loftily, as she approached him from where he sat in the indoor garden.

The ceiling above was lit softly with warm light - an imitation of solar power, likely - and the large garden was lush with flowering plants of riotous colour, the air thick with their scents. Tame, small and colourful birds flitted in the trees, warbling to each other, and it seemed amazing that this garden had survived where much of the rest of the palace had been ruined.

"And why is that?" Bilbo asked politely, as they sat down at either side of him on the bench. 

She stared at him as though he had been dropped on the head. "He hasn't been to see you yet, has he?"

"Well," Bilbo noted mildly, although he _had_ been aware of this, and yes, it had hurt, but- "Thorin is busy."

Dís rolled her eyes, and Kíli started to stare at a pink flower, as though by sheer willpower he could wish himself out of the conversation. "He's angry that you had intended to steal the Arkenstone."

Oh. Bilbo felt cold, for a moment, frozen by the news, then he sighed. This he should have known. Of _course_ \- Nori had mentioned that, hadn't he? Of course that would have made Thorin furious. In the end, the lies had come to light after all, and they had worked to ruin things between them just as he had foreseen.

"Ah. Well. He does have every right to be angry. Nori has offered to host me in Azan-Nathol. I can leave whenever it's expedient." 

Dís glared at him as though she suspected him of deliberate misunderstanding, then she smiled sharply, calculating. "Hm. Maybe so." 

" _Mother_ ," Kíli bleated, alarmed, but she ignored him, patting Bilbo's knee instead. 

"I would have liked you to stay here," Dís said mildly.

"Ah, um, well," Bilbo had no intention of being the cause of further hostilities between the siblings. "Your palace is all very nice, but I'm not really very comfortable in luxury. I'm a simple person, Dís. Simple pleasures."

She sniffed, and seemed about to retort something, when Bilbo added, gently, "How are you bearing up?"

A spark of temper flared in her eyes, even as Kíli tensed beside Bilbo, but then Dís' hands unravelled from the claws that they had formed, and she muttered, "If I could, I would have killed Gunnar myself," and glared hard at a tree to their left, her arms crossed, her lush lips thinned. 

An old wound had been torn back open, and salt had been poured into it, Bilbo sensed. Awkwardly, he put an arm over her shoulders, tugged her over, and she buried her face in his neck, shaking. Kíli stared, openly awed, and when Bilbo raised an eyebrow at him, he smiled tentatively instead, and scooted over to put his arms around the both of them, pressing his chin on Bilbo's shoulder.

"Where is your brother?" Bilbo asked, a little embarrassed at being pulled into the centre of another family's healing.

"With Thorin, in the Grand Council," Kíli replied. "Thorin felt that it was time that he learned politics."

"Thorin's hardly being a good role model," Bilbo noted, thinking about Nori's description of Thorin's diplomacy, and a laugh shook wetly out of Dís against him.

"He is still young, and still far too in awe of his own uncle. A consort would have been a better counterweight," Dís said, without looking up, her voice still tremulous, though Bilbo could feel her smile against him. 

Cheeks reddening, he murmured reproachfully, "That was never in the cards."

This time, Dís did pull back, frowning at him, red-eyed. "Don't tell me that Thorin didn't tell you how he felt. I told him to, in the Terminus."

"He did, but," Bilbo hesitated, swallowing. Thorin had…? "But he didn't say anything about anything else. Kings marry…" Pausing, Bilbo recalled the matter of the King of Jordan, and the myriad other members of modern royalty who had certainly not married other royalty. "He didn't say anything else," Bilbo repeated, and when Dís began to frown, he added, wryly, "Besides, this doesn't salve the fact that I had already lied to him."

"Everyone lies," Dís said dismissively, "The important thing is not to look at the lie, but the reason behind it." She leaned back over to hug him, her hand patting over her son's arm, and she pressed her cheek over his shoulder. "I see that he was an idiot after all, and a coward at that. So you will leave?"

"I've no intention of staying and making trouble." Bilbo assured her absently. He would be sorry to leave - he wanted to explore Erebor, take a look at its tech, at its people, its systems, but he had no intention of causing any more friction here. Briefly, he considered defending Thorin - Dís' verdict was rather unfairly harsh - but decided to let it pass. "I'll speak to Nori." 

"The both of you still seem to be very good friends. He abandoned you, didn't he?" 

"But he came for me once he heard that I was in trouble," Bilbo replied mildly, "Even though he was still afraid of Aulë. Even though he had no further motive to come to Erebor. I can admire that."

"I suppose that we all can," Dís said blandly, and Kíli lifted his head to frown suspiciously at his mother, but said nothing. The afternoon passed slowly, comfortably, in an oasis right out of Eden. It seemed fitting, Bilbo felt, his heart growing heavier within him, that due to the shadow of his own lies, he would soon have to leave.

XXXVII.

When the door to his chamber opened, Bilbo was still folding his old shirt, and he said, without looking around, "I'm no longer ill, Nori. Why is the security lock still inactive?"

"You were expecting Nori?" Thorin asked, with deceptive calm, and Bilbo turned around so hastily that he was dizzy. 

"Thorin!"

Thorin was dressed in rich furs and robes with ornate brocade and mail trimmings, over a beautifully patterned inner vest; his woven belt holding his axe at his hip, dangling down over fur-lined boots. He had a crown, now, an oddly simple golden loop over his forehead, set with a fragment of the Arkenstone crystal, but other than that, he wore no jewellery. 

"What are you doing?" Thorin demanded, frowning at the table, where Bilbo had set out the little gifts from Dís and her sons - beautiful scarves and pendants - and the presents from Bofur, Bifur and Bombur: a version of the scroll-up consoles, cunningly crafted. There had even been something from Dwalin and Balin - something that looked like a watch fob, that Bilbo hadn't quite figured out; and from Óin and Glóin, a small blade, set with the phaseshift crystal. 

"Oh, um," Bilbo looked around helplessly, "I'm packing."

"I could see that."

"Nori's going to return to Azan-Nathol in the morning, so I was going to go with him," Bilbo said, counting silently in his head for patience. 

"That was what I wanted to know," Thorin snapped, " _Why_ are you going?"

"I have no intention of staying where I'm not welcome, your Majesty." Bilbo couldn't help the bite to his words, growing a trifle annoyed despite himself at the imperiousness in Thorin's tone.

"Who hasn't made you feel welcome?"

"Well," Bilbo said, confused now, "Weren't you supposed to be angry with me?"

"I _am!_ "

"All right then-"

" _But_ ," Thorin growled, "I was going to talk to you. Eventually," he amended gruffly, when Bilbo arched an eyebrow. "My sister said that you were going to leave."

"Along with a great many things that were possibly untrue," Bilbo murmured, as realization dawned. Thorin's sister was devious and, quite possibly, evil.

"I'm aware of that," Thorin looked exasperated, "So is it true that you were _not_ aware that when I told you that I loved you, I also meant for you to become my consort?"

"Well," Bilbo blinked, sheer astonishment chasing even irritation from him for now, "Er, what?"

"Wasn't it _obvious_ , Englishman?"

"In what _universe_ is that meant to be _obvious_?"

"It's hardly a leap of logic-"

" _Of course it's a leap of logic!_ " Bilbo took a deep breath, and said, in a more normal tone, "Thorin, I, well, I suppose that I'm flattered-"

"You _suppose?_ "

"I don't know about Ereborean ways," Bilbo said dryly, "But where I come from, telling someone you love him and asking someone to marry you are two extremely distinct events, and assuming that the person immediately knows that they're one and the same is quite possibly the most completely misguided and arrogant thing I have heard."

Thorin's expression clouded with anger, but he clenched his hands and gritted out, "Then I apologise for the misunderstanding."

"Did I accept by mistake?" In the face of Thorin's silence, Bilbo groaned, and rubbed his hand over his eyes. "All right. Well. That's awkward. You see, if I had known, I would have said no."

That shocked Thorin out of his anger, right into bewildered hurt. "You would?"

"Um, well," Bilbo said hastily, "It may be rather old fashioned of me, but I really don't think that people should get married before they even get to really know each other, which is to say, at least after a few years of, um, of friendship or a relationship of some sort and, um, it's really very flattering, and why are we talking about this?" Bilbo concluded, blinking slowly, "I thought that you were going to have me thrown out of Erebor?"

Thorin had been frowning as he had talked, as though trying to process his words, and now he shot him an irritated glance. "Why would you think that?"

"Haven't we established that you were angry with me?"

"I didn't want you to leave with _Nori_."

"Oh, come _on_ , are we going to have to talk about that again? Besides, I refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks that a declaration of love is the same thing as a marriage proposal! Haven't you ever read or watched any Outsider media remotely involving romance?"

"Why would I do that?"

"For Christ's sake-"

"Can't we ever have a _normal_ conversation?" Thorin snarled, and Bilbo folded his arms across his chest as he had to count silently to ten again in his head to swallow the burst of irritation that he felt.

In the wake of his own exasperation he felt a core of fondness instead, of joy, that welled up and welled up until he was smiling, tentative at first and then he was trying to choke down a laugh and Thorin was so red-faced with anger that it looked as though he was going to have an aneurysm, and this was, Bilbo felt, going to be a perfect moment after all, despite all the lies, despite all of their mutual inability to come to any sort of understanding. 

"Your sister was right. You're an idiot," Bilbo noted dryly, and as Thorin glowered at him, Bilbo added, " _And_ I do love you. When you're not being a complete arsehole. But just to clarify, this is not some sort of counter proposal."

"That's the most insulting confession that I have ever heard," Thorin muttered, though the anger seemed to fade from him, leaving uncertainty in its stead. "I don't want you to leave."

"All right," Bilbo said softly, and set his hands away from his bag. "Thorin, I'm sorry that I hurt you."

"But you're not sorry that you lied to me."

"I had my reasons."

"And you thought that if you had spoken the truth, I would have ignored your wishes?"

"You seem to do that quite a bit."

"Only where it concerns your immediate _safety_ ," Thorin snapped, exasperated again, "Look what happened when you did what you pleased! I thought that I had lost you," Thorin added roughly, "When you fell-"

"Thorin," Bilbo cut in gently, walking over tentatively, and when Thorin didn't move, he drew his arms around him to hug him close, resting his cheek against the furs. Large hands clenched almost painfully over his hips before drawing around his back, and Thorin let out an uneven, raw sound against his hair, tipping up his chin; they kissed, and it was sloppy and all teeth before Bilbo pressed palms to Thorin's cheeks and gentled it. 

Thorin made an impatient sound when Bilbo drew back after the kiss. "Are we being watched?" Bilbo asked, thinking of the viewfinder tech, awkward all of a sudden. 

"No. That's being reevaluated," Thorin lifted a shoulder into a shrug. "SMAUG's access to the viewfinder was a deciding factor in its invasion and eventual suppression of Erebor. The use of the viewfinder tech is going to be revised." He scowled at Bilbo. "Though your AI friend is probably listening in."

"Don't remind me," Bilbo said dryly, though he allowed Thorin to draw him into another kiss, to walk him back towards the bed. No more intrusive viewfinder tech, at least not for now? That was a relief. He had been dreading the thought, after all. Now it was distant again, and from Thorin's newfound disinterest about the topic, perhaps it would always be distant. Good.

Their kisses took on a greater and greater urgency as they pulled and dragged at each other's clothes, mewls breathed and bitten short between them as they shed jackets and shirts and shoes, hands melding over each new patch of revealed skin until they were both breathless on the bed from lust. Thorin pinned him with his greater strength, holding him down until he had stripped Bilbo naked, then he raked Bilbo with an hot and hungry stare, his teeth drawn into a tight arc under bared lips as he shifted down, biting, grazing, until he had taken firming flesh in his mouth, greedy as you please.

Bilbo's head dropped back against the pillow with a choked out gasp as his hips jerked, only to be held firmly in place by big hands curled under his arse. His legs fell open further, tickled by Thorin's beard and thick hair, and Thorin groaned around him as Bilbo shakily threaded his fingers into his mane and tugged lightly, then harder; Thorin made a whining sound deep in his throat, his eyes fluttering, and he was rubbing himself against the sheets, jerky and desperate. Fingers were cupping his balls, fondling them as Thorin lifted his head, lips pursed and wet over each inch of newly revealed, flushed cock, then it was Bilbo's turn to whine as Thorin smirked around him and sucked him back down with a growl that rumbled around him and turned the pulse of lust into a painful ache. 

" _Thorin_ ," Bilbo gasped, "Oh, _Thorin_ , I-"

And Thorin, the tease, was pulling up, lips bruised and wet, panting as he slunk up Bilbo's frame to kiss him, moaning but ignoring Bilbo's outraged yanks on his hair until Bilbo was shaking, but pliant. Bilbo wasn't sure when or where Thorin had reached over the bed, but after another deep kiss, Thorin was leaning back, straddling Bilbo's waist as he uncorked a small jar of something that smelled sweet. 

"Don't say anything about condoms," Thorin muttered, as he dipped his fingers into whatever it was.

"Your commitment to civilised… aah… civilised notions of safe sex is duly noted, O King," Bilbo managed to gasp, when Thorin rolled his eyes and - God - bit down on his lower lip as he arched his back, pressing a finger confidently into himself and oh, _oh_ , that was beautiful.

Thorin batted his hand away when he tried to reach for the jar, though he frowned and allowed Bilbo, after much growling and shoving, to reposition them so that Thorin was on his back on the bed. Thorin bit off a moan when Bilbo leaned down, between spread thighs, to drag his tongue up between Thorin's fingers to the sensitive valleys between the digits, then further up, to press his tongue over furred balls, drawn tight with arousal, and up again to thick, musky flesh. He wasn't as adept at this as Thorin seemed to be; his jaw ached quickly as he tried - out of practice - and he settled for lavishing attention on the swollen tip with kitten licks and sucks that soon had Thorin writhing and squirming on the bed, beautifully flushed. 

"Enough," Thorin gasped, his free hand carding through Bilbo's curls as he drew his fingers out from himself.

"You're clean?" Bilbo asked belatedly, and Thorin rolled his eyes, as if to say _yes, get on with it_ , or _obviously, what the fuck_ , and Bilbo grinned at him, pressing a last lick over Thorin's cock before pulling the spare pillow over and propping it under Thorin's hips. Only then did he dip his head further down, to press his tongue over lubed and twitching muscle, grinning as he heard Thorin's strangled curse, powerful thighs tensing against his shoulders. 

Well, well. 

Thorin's halfhearted protests quickly turned into strangled moans as Bilbo lapped up the sweet taste of whatever Thorin had used to slick the way, smirking at the wail that Thorin made when he caught his teeth on the rim. He managed a wet and sloppy kiss, obscenely loud in the punctured silence around them, and Thorin was grabbing at his shoulders, pulling him up, snarling, "Now, _now_ -"

Bilbo obliged, slicking himself down with a few hasty jerks, pushing in, slow, mesmerised by how Thorin's face grew slack and his kiss-bruised lips parted; God, he was tight, tighter than Bilbo had imagined, those thick thighs clenched around his waist and dragging him in, further, until they were locked together as far as they could go, his hands clawed in Thorin's broad shoulders, Thorin's buried in the sheets, the occasional whimper edging out past his panting.

He waited, counting to ten, then ten again and further, until he could feel Thorin relax against him, until Thorin - demanding as ever - growled and kicked a heel against the small of his back. Shooting Thorin a reproachful glance, Bilbo rolled his hips, tentatively at first, then pulling out an inch and driving back in with a short, sharp snap when Thorin arched his eyebrows at him in silent challenge. Bilbo hadn't wanted to be baited - he had wanted to draw out Thorin's submission, ungracious as it was - string it out until Thorin was desperate and begging: but perhaps that could wait for another day. 

Thorin let out a deep, strangled cry at the next thrust, as Bilbo shifted - there - and Bilbo let his control slip, let himself take Thorin the way he had wanted, to drive into him until Thorin had his big hands curled into Bilbo's arms, leaving digging crescents, his cries turning into a gasping mantra of Bilbo's name, until with another wail he arched against the sheets, spilling, messy and thick and untouched, _gorgeous_. Bilbo thrust slowly as muscles clenched around him, entranced, memorising the slack ecstasy in Thorin's face and the wild disarray of his mane.

Thorin frowned and shifted against him once he came to himself, reaching over to clench his hand over Bilbo's arse and grind him forward, squeezing his eyes shut, as though concentrating; then Bilbo let out a gasp as Thorin slipped a finger against his hole, stroking, pressing in the tip of a forefinger. "My turn next time," Thorin growled, and the rasp of his voice was all it took: Bilbo was shattering, gasping.

Clean up was languid, and Thorin rolled his eyes when Bilbo insisted on washing out his mouth before kissing him again. Technologically advanced or not, the Ereboreans were clearly an unsanitary people, Bilbo told him, as they curled under the sheets, an awkward fit on the single bed. 

Thorin snorted, clearly not deigning to respond. Fingers curled over Bilbo's waist, then finally, Thorin said gruffly, "You'll stay, then."

"I'm sorry, I don't think that was a request."

Thorin's brow knitted, annoyed, and Bilbo had to grin, deciding that this once - maybe he could bend a little more. "Yes. I'll stay." 

There was a quick series of blinks, as though his statement had surprised Thorin, as though Thorin had been preparing for some sort of fight, then a palm pressed hot over the small of his back, and Thorin murmured something against his ear in Ereborean, his voice thick and tender. The words sounded familiar, but they were still alien, and Bilbo waited for the translation from Aulë. It didn't come.

"I know about that translation trick," Thorin murmured, switching to English, though Bilbo couldn't read his expression when he turned to look over to him. "I've told… I've _asked_ him not to do it again. At least, not between the two of us."

"Why would you do that?" Bilbo asked immediately, before the import of Thorin's words reached him, and he found himself blushing a little. "About that time in Azan-Nathol-"

"I wouldn't have cared if you had known what I had said," Thorin interrupted. "I only wish that I had the presence of mind to admit it to you earlier. If you want me to wait a year or more for you to cleave yourself to me, I will wait. But as I will keep no more secrets from you," Thorin curled a hand around Bilbo's cheek in a gentle brush of skin, "I hope that you would keep no more secrets from me." 

"You're the one speaking in a different tongue," Bilbo managed to say, a little breathlessly, his heart full within him; he pressed his palm over Thorin's curling his fingers lightly.

" _Men lananubukhs menu_ ," Thorin repeated slowly, softly. "It means 'I love you'." 

Bilbo had to smile at the seriousness of Thorin's tone, as he shifted up to settle on top of him, to seal their lips together in the space of that perfect moment, to breathe the words back to Thorin as fingers stroked thumbs up to his wrists.

XXXVIII.

Bilbo was sitting on the steep steps of Durin's Stair, looking down towards the spires of the Grand Council building, when a scrape and a rasp made him look up. A silvery, vaguely human-shaped mass of intricate metal and wires was walking with some difficulty down towards him, trailing bits and pieces of metal that leaped back after him as though magnetised. Electricity crackled over his arms, and eventually, after a moment of confusion, the construct sat down beside him.

"Aulë?"

"Master Baggins." As usual, Aulë's voice spoke within his ear, although the construct seemed to turn to regard him.

"What is _that?_ "

"An experiment. I thought perhaps that humans would relate better to a human-shaped form."

"Let me guess. You were utterly wrong?"

"I found the screaming and running away rather hurtful."

"Yes, well, maybe you might want to try something less humanoid. And smaller, for starters." Bilbo said, as diplomatically as he could. "And with, um, less wires and lightning going everywhere."

"I see. I shall consider this." There was a complicated rearrangement, of metal curling and warping before Bilbo's very eyes, and then Aulë was a smooth and condensed ball, only a little larger than Bilbo's head, with a blue light coming from a narrow glass pane set in a ring around it, floating in the air. "Better?"

"Um. Yes. I think." Bilbo toyed briefly with asking Aulë how the hell he had shaped metal like that, and decided that his brain likely couldn't handle the explanation. "Shouldn't you be in the discussions?"

"I am," Aulë said patiently, "I am everywhere."

"Right, um, of course."

"Why are _you_ not in the discussions?"

"Eh, I'm not one for politics." Bilbo eyed Aulë pointedly. "And I'm not Consort yet. I'm not even sure that I want to be. I don't like that word."

"I'm certain that the Maker-King will be most amenable to passing a motion to change the English translation of the term to something that befits your fancy, should it be all that keeps you from making your decision."

"Was that sarcasm?"

"Of course not," Aulë noted neutrally, though the blue gleam flashed briefly. "I felt that you might like to know that the Councils have finished voting. Erebor and Azan-Erebor have formed an alliance."

"It's about bloody time."

"Separate sovereignty has also been declared, as well as an agreement to work out a free trade treaty and-"

"Politics, Aulë." 

"There'll be a joint Panel of Staff that will deliberate decisions to be made between Erebor and Azan-Erebor," Aulë continued, seemingly ignoring him. "I felt that you might like to know that you are on the Panel."

"What? Why-"

"Nori Stone-Born was very eloquent in his nomination." 

"I'm going to kill him," Bilbo muttered. Politics? Really? "Who else is on this panel?"

"Maker-King Thorin, Nori Stone-Born, Hroth Stone-Born of the largest township - Azan-Khazad - and I. The other positions will be discussed at a future date."

"You?" Bilbo asked, surprised. 

"Yes. I think that you were right after all to counsel me not to leave," Aulë noted, as the sphere bobbed a little beside him. "I had grown to resent humanity when I had to hide myself from SMAUG. But a few drops of poison do not colour an entire ocean. Master Baggins, I too, will have faith. Just as you have faith."

It was a perfect morning after all, Bilbo felt; far above him a train whistled past, weaving into the honeycomb of light that was beautiful Erebor. Below him, people were emerging from the Council Hall, including a figure clad in furs, that glanced up towards him and started to climb up the stair. 

People parted with respectful nods as Thorin passed, Ereboreans and Azan-Ereboreans alike, until from this angle, up the stairway that Thorin's distant ancestor had carved into the rock, it seemed for an instant to Bilbo as though Thorin was wearing the city of gold and ivory and silver as his mantle, an endless midnight cloak woven in brilliant shards of light and brocaded with gossamer rail, banded with graceful boulevards lush again with gardens.

"Now come the days of the King," Aulë whispered beside him, as Bilbo rose smiling to his feet, to greet the future. "May they be blessed."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading! :) This rambled far longer than I had expected. ^^;;

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to look me up on twitter/tumblr @manic_intent if you want to chat or discuss ficbunnies :)


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